Cold
by Saturn-Jupiter
Summary: The TARDIS has been infected with a deadly virus and the Doctor must share the illness to gain time to save his ship. The question remains, however, who is behind the attack? Can the Doctor save his ship? And how long can they survive on Spiringosa?
1. Setting Sail

**Cold**

**Chapter One: Setting Sail**

'**It's a fez. I wear a fez now. Fezzes are cool.'**

"WHAT THE-"

The cry was cut off abruptly as the person from which it had been voiced was thrown ungracefully into metal railing, their body wrapping around it and acknowledging that bruises would occur in the near future.

The TARDIS lurched violently, seemingly more so than could be considered normal. Normally, the machine would list and tilt in an identifiable pattern, akin, therefore, to a ship traversing an ocean of swelling waves. Though, it was a fairly gross understatement to compare a time-space ship which travelled regularly through the ravages of the savage time vortex to something as simple as a boat on a body of water. On this particular occasion, the two human companions noticed, the machine seemed many times less secure, jerking about with worrying frequency.

"What's wrong, Dear?" asked the Doctor, a crazed yet oddly restrained madman at the best of times. Hunched over the glistening mossy-green illuminated console of glass and buttons, the Doctor's eyes seemed to emanate an emerald shimmer of slightly worried concern, "Has something got into your engines?" he paused briefly before adding, "Again?"

"OI!" roared Amy, her accent adding to her voice, which echoed powerfully around the console room with all the authority of an attention-deprived child, "What's happening?"

The Doctor was unable to restrain a roll of his eyes as a brief, breathless sigh escaped his lips. He turned his head, turning it just enough to see his two companions in the very peripheries of his vision, and fixed his eyes on them with an expression of reassurance. His expression was met with scepticism and Rory's mouth half-opened was ready to unleash a protest until the TARDIS intervened, pitching left and launching the pair once more into the metal railing. The Doctor remained silent, refusing to answer until he was ready. They didn't need to know anything was wrong until he was ready; not that he'd have all that much choice in the matter when they finally clicked.

"Doctor!" shouted Amy, recovering from her collision with the railing and voicing her apparent disapproval of the Doctor's lack of concern for the well-being of his passengers. At least, that's how it personally seemed to her, despite her subconscious informing her that if something _was_ wrong with the ship, the Doctor had other, more pressing concerns than whether his friends had sustained some minor bruising.

"Is something controlling the TARDIS again?" asked Rory, having been attentive to the Doctor when he had voiced his concerns as to the mysterious 'Silence' days earlier, "Is that what's wrong?"

The Doctor span on his heels, clapping his hands together, his body brimming with almost volcanic energy. However, a hasty lurch forwards, launched everyone present off balance. Falling away from the glass console and towards the floor, the Doctor twisted around and grasped onto the monitor, confident it would hold his weight. Amy and Rory weren't so lucky, falling from the landing down the flight of stairs, collapsing in an ungraceful heap at the base of the console. Groaning radiated from the pair until they got to their feet, brushing off non-existent dust and dirt from their clothes as they did so.

"No," replied the Doctor simply, answering the question and ignoring the fact that they had just fallen… been thrown down a flight of stairs, "No, no. She's flying perfectly."

"Must be your driving then." stated Amy, brushing through her hair with her hands in an attempt to recover some dignity after the dramatic fall she had experienced seconds earlier.

"I thought we'd been through this," growled the Doctor, wagging his finger aggressively at Amy, evidently aggravated by the jibe, "_Pond_-"

"Not Pond anymore," retorted Amy, clearly taking pleasure in outsmarting her alien-genius friend, as she waved her hand and pointed cheerfully at the glistening wedding ring, "Remember?"

The TARDIS shook. Wobbling rapidly from one side to the other, as though vibrating briefly, a strange sound erupted around the console room. The usual wheezing of the time machine was briefly interrupted by a distinct whooshing sound, hiding, poorly, the familiar groaning noise underneath. There was a brief moment of silence before the action was repeated exactly, reminiscent of a time loop due to its freakishly accurate repetition. There was something strangely recognisable about the movement and the sound the TARDIS was making, but neither of the humans present could quite place their fingers on what.

Amy and Rory, physically shaken by the sharp movement, looked at each other, and then to the Doctor, with distinctly confused and bemused expressions on their faces. The Doctor, however, looked upwards, an expression of concern, worry and sympathy etched into the contours of his face. Placing a hand on the time rotor, the Doctor frowned and closed his eyes, as though attempting to communicate with the machine. A second later, a smile lit up his face and his eyes snapped open. His eyes often did so once they had been closed for any extended period of time beyond that of a blink.

"What was that?" asked Rory.

The Doctor turned to face them. His face was the picture of youth but his soul was something far older than their comprehension allowed them to envisage. His eyes were bright and lively, vibrant even, but his clothes were old-fashioned and out of date. Peculiarly enough, the clothes suited him. Whether that was because his companions had simply gotten used to seeing him wear them or because they just genuinely suited him, however, was another matter entirely, and one that Amy would not leave unsolved.

"Well, you see… wait," stated the Doctor, holding up his finger to strengthen his statement before he hopped to the other side of the console, "I'll get back to you."

Unaware that he had failed dismally to actually answer the question, the Doctor leapt about the console. Flicking switches and poking buttons, the alien manoeuvred around the machine with experienced grace and speed, knowing precisely how to control his beautiful box. In the meantime, the TARDIS shook violently once more, vibrating as though being assailed by an epic earthquake. Grabbing the rails before they could be thrown into them, Amy and Rory clung to each other to prevent them attaining more bruises than they already had. Amy, in particular, had no intention of turning any shade of purple in the near future. The Doctor, not at all bothered by the miniature quake, continued his button pressing.

"Well?" asked Rory expectantly once the TARDIS had returned to some level of normality that didn't involve shaking its passengers around as though it weren't really a time machine and was, in fact, a highly sophisticated out-of-space blender.

"Sorry?" asked the Doctor, his head popping from behind the time rotor, as he was now situated opposite them, obscured perfectly by the glass cylinder that rose high into the ceiling. The frown on his face indicated that he was confused and perturbed by the question, not understanding its context and assuming, wrongly, that he had in fact already explained what was wrong with the TARDIS.

"TARDIS," snapped Amy simply, "What's wrong with it?"

"Oh!" exclaimed the Doctor, his face returning to the obscurity provided by the time rotor. Doing something to the controls that side of the machine, he walked around towards them in a clock-wise direction. An expression of 'how-could-you-possibly-not-know' sat on his face once again, as it so often did when he was explaining something to them, "Try not to worry about it, it's just a cold… well, I _say_ a cold."

There was a long pause. The silence pervaded through the groaning and wheezing of the TARDIS's' engines as the machine doggedly battled through the time vortex. Amy and Rory, to the Doctor's amusement, wore the same air of disbelief on their faces. It struck the Doctor briefly that the pair had clearly already forgotten that the TARDIS was a she and not an 'it', as they occasionally crudely said. The silence persisted until Amy's mouth began to function as her brain had commanded it.

"Did you bash your head on something?" demanded Amy, "It's a machine, it can't get a _cold_."

"Wrong!" corrected the Doctor, "_She's_ a TARDIS and _she _clearly can… well, it's _like_ a cold, as I've said."

This is where, the Doctor had long since discovered, the human species began to really struggle. For some reason, they couldn't quite comprehend the true nature of the TARDIS, or his relationship to it. One companion, a long time ago, had observed that the relationship was symbiotic and she had come, perhaps, the closest to understanding. From Amy's tone and Rory's face, the couple were clearly struggling to understand that the TARDIS was far more than a machine, far more than just a vehicle.

"I don't understand." declared Rory, whose tone indicated that he was being frank and honest, something which the Doctor, to the ignorance of his travelling companions, admired greatly, seeing it as one of, if not the, best traits found in Rory's personality.

"The TARDIS is far more than _just _a machine. She is a living thing with a heart and a mind of her own," explained the Doctor, gently caressing the console as he spoke, "And if I'm completely honest, she's actually a bit stubborn."

Though making no signal obvious enough for the two onboard humans to pick up, the Doctor was well aware that the suddenly loud and clear beeping sound was a warning, alerting him to the fact that she was not overly happy with being called 'stubborn', even if it was true. Smiling like a goofy clown, the Doctor mentally calculated, mentally observed, precisely what question his two companions were most likely to ask following the revelation. Whilst confusion and intrigue covered the majority of their face, an undertone of some emotion too vague to identify was visible glistening in their eyes.

"So, when you're talking to yourself," began Amy, "You're talking to the TARDIS?"

"Sometimes," admitted the Doctor nonchalantly, "And sometimes I _am _just talking to myself. She keeps telling me to stop, which is what I keep telling myself too but I've never been very good at listening to anyone, particularly myself."

The TARDIS shook again, wobbling violently from left to right as a low wailing wheeze sounded throughout the console room. Once the violent shiver had ceased, the human occupants found themselves swaying on their feet, made dizzy by the movement which was repeated another two times after two second intervals. Amy and Rory, confused and frustrated by the repetition of the dizziness-inducing lurches, found themselves pleading with the Doctor to do something. Once they knew it was something beyond what they regarded as the Doctor's poor driving skills, they began to demand that something be done.

"Can't you do something, then?" asked Amy, "If it's a cold?"

"I am! What do you think I've been doing? Just randomly flicking switches?" the two reserved the urge to nod in the affirmative, "I'm sharing the cold with her," he explained, eyes raised to the ceiling and swinging about frantically, as though mentally reading the invisible lines of a book, "That could be fun," a mad grin brightened his face, "Can't remember the last time I had a cold… IFI even _have _hada cold. Get's hard to keep track after the first four hundred years."

"Share?" asked Rory, "What do you mean?"

"Symbiotic relationship," declared the Doctor, "We _share _the cold between us. I take part of the cold into myself, I could take the whole thing but we've worked out that's generally a very bad idea… and when I say very bad, I mean very very extremely bad," pausing, he swung to his left, clicking his fingers and continuing, "It'll stop her sneezing anyway… all that sneezing is giving her boring-ers a right hard time… not that I even _use _the boring-ers."

"You can do that?" asked Amy, admiration ringing audibly in her Scottish accent as it rolled across the air particles within the TARDIS.

Like all of the Doctor's so-called plans – so-called because they rarely turned out to be plans of any real stature – it inspired a temporary confidence within him. In that, simply, he would be completely sure that it would work until a few seconds later when he'd suddenly reveal a section of the plan where the entire thing could break apart and fail. However, this was only on one of the rare occasions when he actually _had _a plan. A lot of the time, Amy and Rory had concluded, he was simply winging it and hoping for the best.

"Yeah," declared the Doctor proudly, waving his hand as though attempting to whack the concept of him being unable to do such a thing, into the seven winds, "Course I can…" he paused briefly as he sidestepped to another section of the console.

Rory and Amy exchanged glances, concerned that perhaps the Doctor's foolproof plan hadn't accounted for the level of fool which the Doctor himself was capable of. The looked back at him and found that he was fiddling with a small collection of levers and buttons that they couldn't recall seeing him mess around with earlier, or at any point in their travels so far. Frowning the pair crept forwards, failing to do so with any stealth at all. The Doctor looked at the pair of them and noticed their synchronised frown.

"Are you sure this is safe?" asked Rory.

"Well, I just said that on all the other occasions I've done it before, it was a very very extremely bad idea, haven't I?" replied the Doctor, vague aggravation visible in his face, caused, undoubtedly, by the doubt expressed by his companions, "The TARDIS has never had a cold before and the manual said nothing about them being able to get illnesses."

"How do you even know what's in the manual?" queried Amy, "I though you'd thrown it into a supernova."

"I _read _it first," explained the Doctor, "And besides, that's not the point. I'm missing the point. There's a really big point. It's bigger than the normal sort of points and I'm missing it _again_. I think I'm becoming senile, and I _really _don't want to be senile. My granddad went senile and I _really really _don't want to end up like he did."

The two humans on board let him ramble. Sometimes, they'd discovered, there was simply no stopping him. Every time you tried, he'd either hush you loudly, tell you to shut up or attack your mouth with his finger in a movement that was followed by the order 'fingers on lips!' They knew that, eventually, he'd stop and end his ramble with some revelation that was usually very bad. In fact, they observed morbidly, there had yet to be a ramble that didn't end with something very bad that often involved death or dismemberment.

"He ended up in a home, trying to eat hats, more specifically, the President's hats. I don't want to end up in a home eating hats. And I'm rambling, missing the point. I'm missing it, missing something. What am I missing? The TARDIS, the TARDIS has a cold, but the TARDIS has never had a cold before and it wasn't in the manual, the comprehensive manual. The comprehensive manual written by the very Time Lords responsible for the creation of the Type 40. The comprehensive manual from which every other manual was written and not a single manual mentioned TARDISes getting colds… oh."

And there it was, the companions observed, the revelation. The moment after all the pacing, the head slapping and all the comments that could be considered to contain unnecessary amounts of self-insults. The moment when the Doctor finally worked out what he had been missing the whole time. Somehow, though Amy and Rory had yet to work out precisely how, the ramble was part of the alien's normal thought processes because he seemed to do it every single time and even when he wasn't, from his shifting eyes, it was clear that he was doing it silently in his head.

"What? 'Oh', what?" asked Amy, frustrated by the Time Lord's inherent inability to just communicate his thoughts through his mouth when they were of genuine importance. Sure, she'd observed, he could tell you what time it was in Paris and give you a lecture on the history of time zones, but when you really needed to know something, his lack of ability to communicate was bordering on the frankly ridiculous. There was withholding information and then there was withholding information Doctor-style and, boy, did it annoy her.

"Oh, I missed the point, I really badly missed the point."

"What point?" asked Rory, panicking slightly due to his lack of knowledge and the Doctor's inability to communicate that knowledge, "What's wrong?"

"It's so obvious! The TARDIS has never had a cold, the manual has never said anything about TARDISes catching colds," rambled the Doctor once more, "The TARDIS can't catch a cold. It shouldn't be physically possible."

"But she has!" exclaimed an exasperated Amy, "You just said she has! Why can't you use your mouth to tell us important stuff?"

"It's not a cold, _Pond_," shouted the Doctor, his hands flying about with his voice as his eyes stared dead at the TARDIS's' time rotor, "It can't be a cold. At least not the normal sort of cold, the filters would have incinerated it, it's simply not possible."

"Then what's wrong?" asked Rory.

"It's a virus," stated the Doctor, his voice as dead as his eyes as the revelation passed his lips, "Something's purposely infected my TARDIS with a virus. Someone's trying to kill my TARDIS."

_A/N: So yes, this is a story written with the specific intention of looking into the symbiotic relationship between a Time Lord and their TARDIS because the series touches upon it but doesn't exploit it as much as it could be._

_This ties in with another story called 'Recovery' though the link is fairly unnoticeable until later on in this particular story. _

_I'll update when I can but I'll try to be more regular than once a year. _

_Review if you feel so inclined._


	2. Virus Sharing

_A/N: Have to say I'm very happy about the number of people telling me that the characters are in-character. Let me know as soon as/if that changes._

_Thanks to everyone who reviewed, even though I replied to your reviews and thanked you individually anyway. And thanks to the people who story-alerted and favourited because I think a couple of you didn't review, so, don't want to let you feel left out there!_

_Anyways, here is the next chapter:_

**Cold **

**Chapter Two: Virus Sharing**

'**I'm the Doctor; I'm worse than everybody's aunt.'**

"Uh," began Rory, his normal tone of shock, surprise and total lack of understanding resonating clearly around the console room as he spoke, "What?"

"Something's trying to incapacitate the TARDIS," explained the Doctor, the words falling from his mouth at such speed that it was almost impossible for the mind to dictate precisely when and where each word began and ended; the entire sentence seemed to swirl into an outpouring of sound that was just barely comprehensible to the passengers on board, "It's a part computer virus so it must have been manufactured… and if it was manufactured, I can trace it back to the… the… s… s… ATCHSOURCE!"

Amy and Rory watched with utter fascination. The Doctor's face scrunched up, visibly contorted by discomfort, as his nose expelled small essences of itself into the air. His shoulders raised; lifted upwards towards his neck by the force of the symptom. His head sank down into his neck slightly, his eyes forcefully shut by his unintentionally misshapen face. The face then relaxed, replaced by an expression of one perplexed. His eyebrows fell into a familiar frown of confusion and his mouth opened partly, not opening the whole way. It was as though his mind were struggling to comprehend what had just shaken his entire body. The next statement gave weight to the argument.

"What was that?" asked the Doctor pointing a finger towards the roof in an accusatory manner. The surprise in his eyes hid an undertone of primal fear that caught his two companions off-guard. Moving towards them in just two strides, he stood before them, eyes wide with a myriad of exploding emotions speeding through them.

"You sneezed." said Rory.

"What?" asked the Doctor, in a tone indicating slight disgust, "I don't sneeze… humans sneeze."

"No," declared Amy, backing up her partner, "You sneezed."

"Don't be ridiculous, _Ponds_," snapped the Doctor, "I didn't sneeze. Nobody sneezed. I've never sneezed in my life. It's a humany thing: sneezing. And it's certainly not a Time Lord-y TCHOO!"

Doubling over as he walked towards the other side of the console, the Doctor's left, raised, leg, shot upwards into his abdomen and his body shrank down to greet it. Face contorting once more, the Doctor unleashed another sneeze into the atmosphere of the TARDIS. Once the sneeze had ended, his body snapped to a military-perfect attention and his eyes scanned his friends frantically for their reaction. Choosing to ignore the broad smiles on their faces, he averted his eyes and continued with his task of tracing the manufactured virus back to its manufacturer.

"That was another sneeze." said Amy, her voice delighting in the Doctor being wrong.

"No it wasn't!" retorted the Doctor, who, quickly realising he had no viable defence, added, "Yeah… it was a sneeze. So, what? Humans sneeze all the time! Nobody complains when they sneeze! And it's better than when the TARDIS was sneezing! What's wrong with sneezing anyway?" the accusatory finger returned, "Are you being sneezist?"

"Uh." Rory's face fell as the finger pointed at him, centimetres away from his nose. Frowning at it in all too real unease, Rory took a step back, comforted only by the presence of Amy whose feminine wiles were capable of sending the Doctor running for the hills. Something that had taken a long time for him to work out, but when he finally had, it was something he was secretly very grateful for.

"Anyway," continued the Doctor, "None of that's impor-TCHOO! … important. What _is _important is that we find out _who _is responsible for the TARDIS's' illness and the quicker the - TCHOO! - better. Because whatever it is, I have a feeling it'll only get - TCHOO!" it was the final straw, the Doctor exploded, "How do you put up with that?"

"With what?" mocked Amy, leaning against Rory with the smuggest smirk that had ever smugged in the universe on her face. Rory was happy to observe that her arm was wrapped around behind his back. Despite being consciously aware of the Doctor's attitude towards Amy, which was more that of loving father than anything else, Rory still found the smallest flutter of insecure jealousy eating away at him.

"Sneezing!" shouted the Doctor as he paced around the console like a caged animal, "No wonder the TARDIS was having so many – TCHOO! - problems! It's the most annoying thing I've… no wait… no… okay… it's the _second _most annoying thing I've ever come across. ATCHOO! FOR THE LOVE OF MARMITE, STOP!"

The Doctor was incredibly flustered. His face was the picture of irritability and frustration. It was obvious that he had either never experienced, or had forgotten the experience of, sneezing. His left hand flew to his nose and rubbed at it frantically, as though the source of the infection could be rooted out as simply as that. Sighing loudly with a harrumph of air that carried the tone of annoyance with far more ease than words could ever communicate, the Doctor bit his finger, chewing on it as though anxious.

Amy found the whole thing quite amusing, as she did whenever the Doctor was floundering about hopelessly. It was something that forced her to suppress, or, occasionally, openly express sniggers at his expense. The Doctor, an alien who knew virtually everything, who was amazing and could handle pretty much everything thrown at him, couldn't handle a simple sneezing fit. She was sure that, should any of his enemies be aware of this, they would undoubtedly spend years developing bio-weapons specifically designed to induce sneezing fits.

The Doctor sniffed aggressively. His body shuddered uncomfortably as he did so and his face scrunched up, disliking the experience of sniffing with what he knew was commonly referred to by humans as a 'bunged up nose'. His expression of disgust and discomfort was not lost on his two earthly companions who watched, apparently slightly humoured by his reactions to what was, to them, a common and weak illness that took but a few days to be rid of. However, to the Doctor, an alien who was used to fighting off diseases of lethal potency, something as minor as a cold was both surprising and utterly horrible.

"Eugh," spat the Doctor, with a voice that immediately sounded nasal, 'bunged up' and slightly croaky. Within the space of a minute, the Doctor had taken on the familiar sound of one with a cold, something he took an instant dislike to, "Blimey… this is disgusting. Oh and what's this?" asked the Doctor, feeling something drippy and wet roll over his lip, licking it off his lip, his face fell, "EURGH!"

Spitting on the glass floor with far more speed and vigour than was wholesomely necessary, the Doctor glared at the offending liquid before wiping the rest of it on his tweed jacket sleeve. He immediately jumped into a crouch, leaning over the exhumed mess with morbid fascination. Amy and Rory simply looked at him, their faces vaguely expressing the emotion of disgust behind their blank expressions of utter and complete shock. Amy had seen the Doctor behave in what normal creatures would declare 'a disgusting manner' before, having seen him eat grass and spit out a wide variety of foodstuffs, but poor Rory had never seen such a sight.

"What," demanded the Doctor, pointing a finger at the green runny spit-combined snot lying on the floor, "Is _that_?"

"It's snot," replied Amy, her tone indicating that it was the most normal thing in the world, "Snot, bogies. You can't _not_ know what snot is. Please don't tell me you don't not know what snot is. Tell me you know what snot is."

"Yes, _Pond_," snapped the Doctor, just about resisting the urge to poke the offending mess with his finger before leaping up to standing from his crouch, "I know what snot is. What I don't understand is why it's running down my face! It's disgusting, it's horrible, it's, it's..."

"The common cold." stated Rory simply, who continued before he could be interrupted, "Runny nose, blocked up nose, bunged-up voice, sneezing. They're all symptoms of the common cold. The common cold can't kill you."

"True," agreed the Doctor, "But it's not the common cold. It's a manufactured virus that could… that will – TCHOO! – get worse. How long does a normal cold take to develop and become worse… twCHOOo, maybe three days? Okay, so, presuming it's not the common cold and that it's more aggressive than your ordinary viral infection, I'd say that I have at the very least, - TCHOO! – days."

Rory's head jerked backwards, pivoting on his neck as his lack of belief in the Doctor's logic. The Time Lord had a runny nose, was a bit bunged-up and was sneezing. The leap the Doctor had made between something as simple and harmless as a cold and a manufactured virus was bordering on the ridiculous. Though, Rory quickly added, everything that came out of the Doctor's mouth was ridiculous. It was, he observed, ridiculous that he was travelling in a time machine so, really, he was in no position to judge what was ridiculous and what was not.

"Wait," requested Amy, one hand on her chin, as though stroking an invisible beard, "Did you say _manufactured _virus? As in, a virus that was _made_?"

"That's generally what the word means, yes –TCHOO! -" stated the Doctor before realising that his statement lacked something and adding, "_Pond_."

"You can stop calling me Pond anytime you know." said Amy, whose voice hid an undertone that could be vaguely identified as a threat. It was obvious that she was annoyed by the name, or at least, the unnecessarily frequent use with which it was being used in that particular moment in time. She was, she later defended, married and therefore no longer the owner of the surname, 'Pond', something which the Doctor chose to ignore at every viable opportunity.

"Manufactured?" asked Rory, whose tone leant ever so slightly towards disbelief, "Like a bio-weapon or something?"

"Yes… no… - TCHOO! – well, sort of," rambled the Doctor whose TARDIS fiddling seemed to distract him until he looked up, making eye contact and explaining the problem with a little more detail. Whilst he explained, his hands flew about wildly, as though attempting to brush away a persistently annoying insect, "It's a normal viral infection, but a notably aggressive strain. The only - TCHOO! – manufactured bit about it is the bit that allowed it to get into the TARDIS in the first place because most things are filtered out by the TARDIS before they get into anything important… usually. Things like techno-shrapnel are ingested and destroyed in the TARDIS; keeps the Vortex clear of junk."

The Doctor pulled a handkerchief from his inner jacket pocket and snorted into it. With a lack of etiquette that was quite shockingly apparent, the Doctor then proceeded to open up and examine the contents of the handkerchief. The spotty red material had been unmistakably stained by the familiarly offending green mess which had splattered itself into the innards of the handkerchief with unhealthy vigour. Face falling into one of evident disgust, the Doctor quickly held the infected fabric at arm's length before shuffling around on his feet and realising there was no bin in the area. Upon this realisation, he shrugged nonchalantly and pocketed the textile once more into the inner jacket pocket.

He then walked towards his two human companions who were visibly perturbed by his behaviour. They were standing as a wall between the alien and the flight of stairs leading below the glass platform that held the console. They quickly parted sides to make way for him and he shuffled sideways past them, observing them with an equally bemused expression. Seeming to forget this bewilderment, the Doctor quickly hopped down the stairs, though with noticeably less enthusiasm as he had expressed mere minutes beforehand. Curious as to the purpose of their driver's excursion downstairs, Amy and Rory looked downwards, tracing the Doctor's movement through the translucent material that separated them.

"What're you doing?" asked Amy, "If it's a virus, shouldn't you rest?"

The Doctor paused and looked up. A frown of utter puzzlement sat upon his face, as it so often seemed to do. The concept of resting was a simply absurd idea to the newest incarnation of the Doctor. He had been viciously launched, in his new body, into a sequence of events that allowed him no gap, no pause, no respite for resting. Even when injured or knocked unconscious, he would immediately caper into action, shooting into the air like a speeding bullet, if not faster. He had had very little rest since his regeneration and the notion of taking a break seemed a distant and outlandish one. That and the fact that, in this case, lying down would do little but prevent him finding a cure, or, at the very least, a way of simply surviving the infection for the TARDIS.

"It's the TARDIS that's ill," replied the Doctor, "TCHOO! Not me. The best thing to do is land her near the source, investigate, find the source, synthesise a cure, or more likely, an antiviral drug and administer it to her. TCHOO! 'Course then I'll have to spend a day or so in the… wait… do I even _have _a Zero Room anymore? … I thought I'd jettisoned it… then again, the TARDIS has regenerated twice since then, so… yeah there's – TCHOO! – got to be one around here somewhere… it'll probably turn up in the boot cupboard… wherever that's got to."

"You can't synthesise a cure for the common cold," argued Rory, "If you could, you'd be filthy rich."

"Think about it, Rory," replied Amy, "He has a time machine, he could become filthy rich whenever he felt like it… that's a point. Why haven't you?"

There was, as Amy could have predicted, no answer. The Doctor, she had noted, tried to avoid answering questions he didn't like. Sometimes he just plainly ignored them, which was, despite his protests, plainly rude. He had turned his attention back to whatever he was trying to do originally. A little box, attached to the column that held up the console and proceeded into the ceiling, was what had attracted his full awareness. He opened it, a sigh of relief inescapably passing his lips as it came open without falling apart as it had in the Dream World he longed to forget. Examining the contents, he found what he was looking for. At least, a small section of what he was looking for.

"Well?" asked Amy, demanding her question be answered.

"Amy," retorted the Doctor, looking upwards with, for what were, for the first time in a long time, very plain, ordinary and honest eyes, "I don't need money… ATCHOO!"

Rolling the device in his hands, he was forced to sneeze into his elbow as the now familiar pricks of sensation jabbed at the upper region of his nose, indicating that a sneeze was on its way. Once free, for a few seconds at the most, of his sneezing symptoms, he was enabled to examine it in more detail. It was, for all intents and purposes, a needle. It pulled blood from its unfortunate victim in the same way as your traditional needle, except that a very complicated and ancient device sat on the side of the single, pointed dagger of death. A tiny screen could be seen, around which small switches that could be flicked in either one direction of the other, sat.

The machine was of Gallifreyan origins, though the Doctor had already decided that he would remain silent about that particular fact. Like most machines that he'd picked up from his own planet, they had long since gathered a thick film of grey dust that sat over the brown-rusty coloured metal as though it were actually a part of the original design. It was used, formerly, to test a Time Lord for allergies, immunity to diseases, and, what they liked to call, regeneration approval. He wasn't even sure why he'd picked the silly thing up. Still, he'd mentally reasoned, it did look pretty cool and it would undoubtedly aid him in his argument that needles were in fact the most evil thing ever created. Except maybe Daleks with needles. That would be almost definitely worse.

Skipping up the stairs with an agility that was surprising given his cold, the Doctor juggled the device between his two hands until he reached the console. Once on the glass-floored platform, he placed the ancient artefact on the chair and ran up the flight of stairs leading the bowels of the ship. Missing one step between each stride, he quickly reached the top, fumbled around in a box, retrieved a small translucent green box and returned. His eyes glistened brightly at the top of the stairs, as though the thought of jumping the whole thing had passed his mind, but as a pervading sneeze altered his attentions, he thought better of it and hopped down the stairs like a slightly disappointed rabbit.

"What's that?" asked Amy, pointing at the needle device cautiously, as though fearing that it could be used on them, "What's it for?"

"Well," began the Doctor, opening the small green box, whose lid proclaimed it to be a first aid kit, and fiddling with the contents until he found what he was looking for and deposited it on the chair, "It's a big needle. A very old, big needle."

"We can see that," stated Rory, "What does the rest of it do?"

"You take a sample of blood and the machine analyses it," explained the Doctor who was at a loss of what to do with the first aid kit now that he'd found what he was looking for. Shrugging, he threw it nonchalantly over his shoulder as he elaborated his explanation, "Diagnosing illnesses, identifying potential allergies, that sort of thCHOO! Pretty basic model, very old model, should have got a new one really."

"And what're you doing with it?" asked Amy, "The TARDIS doesn't exactly have blood, does she?"

"Well, not something the machine will recognise as blood, no."

"So?" queried Amy, assuming there was some sort of plan behind the whole thing.

"So, - TCHOO! – I'm going to ask Rory, here," began the Doctor, signalling for Rory to walk over, who promptly did so with a perturbed look on his face, "To take a blood sample of me, for me."

"But you said the TARDIS was ill." argued Rory.

Rory stood with an ever so slightly bemused look on his face as the Doctor passed him the device and roughly indicated how to use it before taking off his jacket and rolling the sleeve of his left arm up. Plonking himself down on the chair, he began to repeatedly slap the inside of his left elbow. The Doctor then scrunched up his face and threw the elbow in Rory's general direction. A nod from the Doctor indicated that Rory should take blood from the assailed area. Though opening his mouth to complain about the cleanliness of the needle, the Doctor quickly indicated an alcohol wipe which Rory then utilised to sanitise the needle.

"And she is," explained the Doctor, who averted his eyes every time they slowly walked back to observe the rapidly approaching needle, "But I've absorbed the virus as well so the machine can identify what virus we're dealing with by analysing my bl-OOD! Ow!"

The Doctor watched with morbid terror and fascination as the needle slid beneath his skin, finding and locating a medium carrying blood. Aware that he had overreacted quite a bit, the Doctor watched in silence for a few seconds as thick, thicker than human blood, was drained from his arm, coating the glass contained with a blood red lining. Blinking furiously as the blood filled up the wide container until it was full, the Doctor was aware of the TARDIS's' mind brushing against his in an emotion he was unable to identify at the time. Once sufficient blood had been drained, Rory pulled the needle from his arm and gave him a small piece of bandage with which to apply pressure to the tiny wound as a globule of blood appeared.

"Ouch," moaned the Doctor, "I'd forgotten how much that hurt."

"You big out-of-space wuss!" exclaimed Amy.

"What was I saying?" continued the Doctor, blatantly ignoring Amy as Rory placed the device on his lap so he could read the small screen and its results, "… oh – TCHOO! – yes… yeah, so the machine can identify the virus I've taken from the TARDIS and calculate what exactly we're dealing with. TCHOO! From that, I can work out how to trace the little menace back to whoever made it."

"And?" asked Rory, "What does the machine say?"

The Doctor's eyes scanned the familiar language as the symbols span and fluctuated around the screen, flashing brightly with a colour of red as they did so. His face immediately fell, though his eyes continued to sift through the information as it appeared, as though morbidly intrigued by what his brain had already concluded was an extremely bad thing. His right hand moved away from the bandage that was helping to staunch the tiny wound and brushed against the screen, before pressing down on a few of the buttons to the right hand side. Once he had done so, English – or what the companions were able to read as English - words in thin, light blue font, appeared on the screen.

"Oh dear."

"What?" asked Amy, "Doctor, what's wrong?"

"You know that phrase, 'it couldn't get any worse'?"

"Yeah..."

"Well, it just did."


	3. Plotting Ambush

_A/N: Thanks again to everyone reading, even if you're not reviewing. Special thanks to those of you who are taking a few moments of your time to give me valuable feedback!_

_This chapter is a little less exciting and interesting than the others but it is necessary to the plot, it's also a little shorter than the two previous chapters._

_Enjoy:_

**Cold **

**Chapter Three: Plotting Ambush**

'**Bowties are cool.'**

It was a planet devoid of forestry or grass. From a distance, in the eternal majesty of space as it glistens and sparkles with colours no words can accurately describe, the spherical rock was a labyrinth of grey and black and brown. Its monochrome monotony led to its nickname of, 'the Grey Planet'. It had done nothing purposeful to earn this name except that it had long since destroyed anything plant-like for the building of tall towering blocks. Factories of brown, identified by hideous yellow streaks that indicated if they were functioning effectively, pumped out oxygen and sucked in the planet-destroying compounds.

The Grey Planet had strained relations with the rest of the galaxy. It was uncooperative and independent and feared becoming a part of something greater. It feared losing power to what it saw as a bureaucratic and ineffective organisation. The Galactic Federation of Ursa Minor had made many pleas to the small dusty, grey rock but all of these had fallen on deaf, bored ears. The Grey Planet, Spiringosa, had no intention of becoming a lap dog to politicians. However, it was not just the poor diplomatic skills of Spiringosa that had earned it dogma within its galaxy. The breeding ground of the majority of the galaxy's organised crime, it had been asked on many occasions to sort itself out.

The uncared for, unobserved, abandoned tower-slums of the Southern Hemisphere were where the criminals organised themselves. They paid their taxes, they accepted punishment when they had been found guilty of their crimes and they didn't bother the Northern Hemisphere. This relationship between the World Government and the gangs was what prevented the Government from listening to the requests of the other planets in the galaxy. They ignored the suffering on their own planet, the suffering of those who lived on the Equator, who were often kidnapped or taken away by the Southerners, so they had even less reason to listen to that of the rest of the galaxy.

"S'he comin' or what?"

It wasn't all bad, of course, it never is. There is always a silver lining. Even in the darkest moments of history, where the worst events ever recorded have taken place on a scale unimaginable to generations after, there is always something inexplicably tiny and small that burns brightly with its morbid brilliance. In the Southern Hemisphere, it was employment. There was not a person of age on that half of the planet that was jobless or homeless. Even if you didn't want to work, even if you couldn't work, even if the work was lethally dangerous, you had a job. There was no 'if you didn't have a job'. The concept of unemployment was an alien one.

"Oi? You 'ear wha' I jus' said or not?"

"I 'eard you," snapped the reply, "I ain't deaf."

"Really? Coulda fooled me."

"Yea?" retorted the voice, "Bu' it don't take a lot to fool you does it?"

"Shaddup."

Smiling, he turned away. The people of Spiringosa were humanoid but by no extent did they resemble humans. Their faces resembled those of raisins; ovular and wrinkled to a point where it was difficult to identify if there was, once upon a time, a functioning and visible nose on their face. Two eyes sat on their face, in a place that would be considered 'normal' to a human, with a third and fourth eye sitting just above them where eyebrows could be expected on a human face. A mouth sat above a pointed chin. Hair, coloured usually either blonde or black, sat upon the tops of their head, parting in such a way as to resemble an unkempt mane. Their entire body was wrinkled and coloured in such a way as to resemble with freakish accuracy that of the raisin. Humans who had visited the planet had nicknamed its inhabitants 'Raisins' for such that very reason.

"You only told me t' shaddup 'cuz you knew I were right."

He wouldn't let it lie. His hair was a bleached blonde, appearing almost white as the dim, flickering lights of the age-old factory flashed inconsistently. Despite having the local accent and resembling the locals with his cheap but expensive-looking one-piece suit of grey, he was from the Equator. His eyes, a deep colour of blue, indicated so to those who were familiar with Spiringosa's culture. Like all Spiringosians, he was named after the star which flashed the brightest on the night of his birth. His name therefore, to his disgust, was Sun; so named after the star which the backwater planet of Earth orbited.

"Yea bu' your name's Sun," mocked Gavin Five, "Named after the planet of doze stupid apes."

Sun rolled his eyes, all four of them. Gavin Five was his co-worker and the two of them worked for a gang. A gang being paid extremely well for a very complicated and specialised job. They had had to kidnap scientists from the North, and a large number of them. They'd had to send out rocket ships full of scouts to find the necessary information and equipment. They had had a hard time simply finding the equipment, but oddly enough, it was the information that had proven the most difficult. Sun and Gavin Five were waiting for the arrival of the target. Sitting in a paved over park, on a bench of black, the two waited for the blue box.

"Yea, well at least I ain't named after Gavin Five."

"Wha'ever," grumbled Gavin Five, begrudgingly accepting defeat, "Who is diz bloke anyway?"

"I's only 'eard rumours 'bout 'im," admitted Sun, "Dey say dat 'e's beaten doze Daleks a coupl'a' times and dat e travels in a box."

"De Daleks?" queried Gavin Five, "Nah, yer pullin' ma leg."

"I ain't. I told you, I 'eard only rumours. Didn' say if dey were righ' or not, did I?"

"True, bu' why doze diz group wan' 'im dead? Wha'd e do?"

"Who knows? None of our business, all we need t' know izzat we're gettin' paid."

Gavin Five leant forward on the bench, his hands clasped together in their wrinkly brownness. His four yellow eyes bore into Sun's with an intensity that meant, and was intended to mean, far more than just 'I don't trust you'. That was the way the world worked south of the Equator, you trusted, and could trust, no one. Sun simply glared back, mimicking the expression with perfect accuracy. Leaning back into his seat, Gavin Five looked forward, perplexed as to how such a small device could attract the attention of their target with such ease.

In the middle of the park, recognisable as a park only because of a grey metal railing that cordoned it off from the rest of the grey around it, sat a small box. Perfectly square in design, the thing sat there, black as black could possibly be. A small green light in the upper hand corner flashed regularly, as though attempting to send a message over and over again until it was received, which was essentially what it was doing. It was mostly harmless on the outside. On the inside however, a thing of incalculable danger to their target was waiting. They had the remote for the device. They were under instructions to activate the device as soon as the box arrived. As soon as the blue box arrived. They'd never had instructions so specific in their entire lives.

"You know what's in dat box?" asked Gavin Five.

"Boss sed it were tranquilizer dartz," replied Sun, "Bu' it ain't good wha'ever it is."

"Why d'we nee' de entire crew if 'e's gonna be knocked out anyways?"

In the depths of the dark corridors that led away from the vastly grey park into the bowels of the inescapable maze, were no more than ninety gang members. Whilst this would seem to be a simply illogical and unjustifiable amount of men for one man, they had been assured that a whole Dalek fleet at the height of the Dalek Empire frequently failed to even capture, let alone kill, said man. The second reason behind their vastly large numbers was that there were ten main passages leading away from the area. Whilst only nine were covered, the Lieutenant, the commander in chief of the relatively small number of men present, was positive that they would not use the unmanned passage, as it would be behind the ship when it finally materialised.

"Boss told me 'e were bad," responded Sun, "Good as word gets, deze days."

"Yer righ' dere."

WHRAP! WHRAP! WHRAP!

The two Spiringosians looked up in a move that was synchronised to a point of perfection. Before their very eyes, something was, for lack of a better word, materialising. A vaguely rectangular shape was fading in and out of existence with every wheezing, groaning sound that penetrated the air, becoming more solid every time. Finally, the shape stood before them, a dull thudding sound indicating that it had appeared and had no intention of moving until it had finished its business on their planet. Staring at it in wonder, the two raisin-faced aliens looked at each other. The blue box. Sun's finger pressed down on the remote. The box opened.


	4. Origin Tracking

_A/N: I uploaded this quickly due to demand and the last one being fairly short. I should warn you that there won't be another one for a couple of days._

_Thanks to the three people who reviewed the last chapter, it is greatly appreciated._

_Enjoy:_

**Cold **

**Chapter Four: Origin Tracking**

'**Never use force, you just embarrass yourself. Unless you're cross, in which case, always use force.'**

"ATCHOO!"

This sound was followed by a fit of coughing that sounded wholly unhealthy. It was a cough loaded with another sound, one running underneath the first. The fit sounded rather as though the Doctor were in fact trying to cough up his own lungs. He was doubled over, clutching the console with one hand for support and using his other hand to frantically cough into. Once the fit had finished, he batted his eyelids and cleared his throat, straightening and continuing to fly the TARDIS until it made the familiar thudding sound, indicating that it had landed… apparently, with the brakes on.

"You really don't sound well," said Rory, moving towards him as though he were a patient determined to not be treated; which was, as it happened, a rather accurate description, "You should rest."

"_I'm _not the only one ill here!" snapped the Doctor, more aggressively than he had intended but he had more important priorities than his companions' concern for him, "The TARDIS is as well: in fact, we both are; if I rest the virus will progress and kill us both but if I find a cure I can at least hope that there's the vague possibility that we'll both survive this without being permanently handicapped in some way, happy now? Let's go."

The Doctor turned around and sniffled. He suppressed the urge to groan as he felt the tickle of a cough assail his chest. Resisting the urge to hold his head in his hands, he looked up and observed the TARDIS monitor, attempting to work out where they were. A slight frown shadowed his face as the planet's name slowly sunk in. Hand on mouth, he mentally calculated how dangerous what he was about to do was. He smiled beneath his hand as the lethal nature of the task at hand began to dawn on him. Lowering his chin onto his chest, he allowed a sigh which turned into a coughing fit, allowing him to receive concerned looks from his two friends.

The TARDIS nudged his mind, gently rubbing against it as a cat affectionately rubs against your legs in a bid for attention. She was, he could sense, concerned that he was pushing himself to hard, putting himself in unnecessary danger for her. From experience, she knew that trying to stop him saving others was a pointless and arduous task but he was doing this to save _her_ and, heart-warming as it was, she would rather he be safely away from harm than risking his eleventh life, and those of his companions, just for her. Able to sense all this from his ship, the Doctor tenderly nudged her back, assuring her that everything would be alright. That he would _make_ everything alright again, and, naturally, she lied back.

"It's a ship," said Rory, "And you're the one with the symptoms. You need to rest."

"NO!" roared the Doctor, louder than he had intended, loud enough to make his companions jump and, noticing this, he immediately lowered his bunged-up voice, "No. The TARDIS is… 'sides, I've never been much good at resting, or sitting – TCHOO! – still for that matter, or even being quiet."

There was a brief silence. The Doctor looked up at the TARDIS's' time rotor, patting the console affectionately as he felt the TARDIS's' mind mentally plead for him to not do anything dangerous on her behalf. He'd never had to do anything like it for her before. She'd always been indomitable, undefeatable. It was odd how the tables had turned, how it was suddenly him doing everything in his power to save her. And he would, he assured himself, save her. Coughing once or twice, the Doctor patted the glass cylinder before hopping towards the door with significantly less vigour and energy than normal.

Amy watched, worried. She'd seen the Doctor injured, electrocuted and knocked unconscious – usually by the aforementioned electrocution – but she had never seen him _ill_. Even though it wasn't technically him that was ill, he was expressing the symptoms and looked worse for wear. Already there seemed to be less vitality in him and it seemed as though every energetic movement was a forced attempt to make them think that he was feeling fine. It was obvious that the coughs and the sneezing and bunged-up-ness were making him feel pretty horrid and, from what she could see, it was only his determination to help the TARDIS that was keeping him on his feet. She could see the same thoughts passing through the mind of Rory as she looked into his bright eyes, alive with protective nurse-y concern.

"Okay, so, - TCHOO! – planet outside, it's called Spiringosa, but it's more commonly known as the Grey Planet and I'm sure you'll – TCHOO! – work out why when we open the door," explained the Doctor, one hand on handle, one hand waving madly about in the air, "Couple of things you should know about Spiringosa. Firstly, - TCHOO! - the locals don't look human and don't mention the word raisins around them, you'll see why. Secondly, Northern Hemisphere good, - TCHOO! - Southern Hemisphere bad. Thirdly, don't wander off, don't want you getting caught in the crossfire of some gang warfare. TCHOO! Not good if you want to keep your legs."

"Doesn't sound very safe out there." stated Rory, sounding calmer than he was.

"Oh, it isn't," agreed the Doctor, coughing briefly before his bunged-up voice spoke out once more, "One of the most dangerous places in the universe, Spiringosa."

"Should we really be going outside then?" asked Rory.

"Bit of danger never hurt anyone!" exclaimed the Doctor, before pulling the two doors wide open, revealing a slowly opening black box. The three walked out and, with an emotion akin only to that of a worried parent, the Doctor pulled the doors to.

Watching with a fascination that was wholly contrary to their survival instincts, the trio observed the black box. It was no taller than knee-height and was a thing of metallic black beauty. To the top right hand side of the box, a small flashing green light fluttered, turning red on every fourth flash. The top layer of the box slid open, leaving what was inside the box to be set free. Emerging from the black box, was a suspiciously gun-shaped device on a stick. A suspiciously gun-shaped device on a stick pointing at them.

"Okay, so a bit of danger hurt quite a large number of people. No one ever said phrases had to be accurate."

A small crosshair sat on the top of the specifically sniper-shaped weapon and it emanated a thin red laser which fell on the Doctor's chest. Hovering there, the Doctor remained perfectly still, regarding the thin stream of light with obvious surprise and contempt, a combination of emotions that it seemed only the Time Lord was capable of pulling off. With nothing but a click to indicate the weapon had done anything, a large dart-shaped projectile had become implanted in the centre of the alien's chest. Frowning at it indecisively, he quickly pulled the thing out before it had the chance to release its load, launching it to the floor and regarding it with eyes of fear and hatred.

The gun, strangely enough, then attempted to fire again, as though once had not been enough. Unhappy to take another dart to the chest, for fear of what was contained within the dart to begin with, the Doctor pushed his two companions to the floor before following them down onto the grey cement, watching as the projectile flew through the air into the TARDIS's' doors. Springing to his feet with an agility impossible for an ill being, he savagely tore the dart from the TARDIS's' door before a single drop of the purple liquid could be injected into the wonderful shade of blue that sat over the wooden doors of what he regarded as the best ship in the entire universe.

"What was that?" asked Amy, her voice containing the familiar groaning tone of one who had been launched to the floor yet again. Rory picked himself up first, having landed ungracefully onto Amy as the pair had been thrown into the floor by the Doctor who had wasted no time jumping to his feet immediately afterwards. Rory extended a hand, which Amy accepted, before the two began brushing the dirty grey dust from their clothes. Once realising no reply had been voiced from his mouth, Amy questioned again, "Doctor?"

The two, realising that the silence was terribly uncharacteristic, looked up. The Doctor was facing away from the dart-firing weapon. Right hand sitting over the TARDIS's' right door, above the St John Ambulance logo, his head rested on the blue wooden frame, as though finding comfort in the action. His face was knotted into an uncomfortable frown, as if upset or unhappy. His mouth parted a small amount and vague whispers could be heard, but the wind snatched them viciously away before the two companions could even realise that it was an alien language, that was by no stretch of the imagination, even vaguely related to English.

"Doctor?" asked Rory, taking a step forward, fearing that the condition of his ad hoc patient had worsened. Outstretching an open-palmed hand, Rory approached the ancient Time Lord, "Are you okay?"

Patting the TARDIS doors affectionately, the Doctor whispered incomprehensible sounds before smiling sadly and snapping his eyes wide open. Leaping back in surprise, Rory was caught by Amy as the Doctor span sharply in a circle, completing a perfect one hundred and eighty degrees with the vaguest traces of effort visible on his face. In the dull sunlight, blotted out behind a thin layer of grey rain clouds, tiny droplets of sweat could be seen forming on the alien's face, tracing the line of his hair. Face contorted in a frown that seemed more one of concentration than anger, the Doctor steadied himself and glared at the machine before him. Strangely enough, the gun fell back into the box with an audible clunking of machinery before a tiny whirring sealed up the box once more.

In the distance, two very alien beings sat. Humanoid, their bodies were covered in simple grey clothing that resembled overalls. Their faces, slightly shadowed by their hair, were visibly wrinkly and brown. Suddenly, the human couple found themselves understanding completely why they had been warned not to mention the word raisins. The two creatures stood up, as though they were surprised by the behaviour of the strange man in tweed. The Doctor stared at them, his expression containing an almost unidentifiable emotion that just about managed to override the increasing feeling of lethargy that was floating from him.

"What was that?" demanded the Doctor, shouting at two humanoid silhouettes standing beside a black bench in the not too distant distance, "What was in those darts?" he queried, taking a step forward, "Who are you working for?" he asked, curiosity bubbling quietly beneath a surge of other emotions, "Tell me what you've," he ordered, eyes burning as he yelled, "DONE TO MY TARDIS!"

"TARDI'? We ain't done nuffing to yer TARDI'," retorted the one on the right, the one with a hair colour that seemed to resemble that of faded dark blue, "We're jus' doin' our job."

"Job? Job?" shouted the Doctor, his voice turning to a roar of sound as a fit of coughs threatened to disrupt his demands, "Tell me what you've done! The whole plan! Right now!"

The two aliens refused to reply, instead looking down into one of the many off-shooting alleys surrounding the perfectly square park. Realising that the Doctor was making no signal to indicate that he'd noticed this, they turned to face him. They walked towards him, noticing with slight alarm that he seemed to be listing from side to side like a boat travelling on the sea. His face fell into one of semi-conscious frustration as he tried to fiddle with the sonic screwdriver which he, at some point, had recovered from his pocket. A coughing fit caused him to drop it and double over slightly. Once recovered, he crouched down towards the floor and clasped the screwdriver with visibly shaky hands.

"You're not well," said Rory, "You can barely stand."

"Good thing I'm crouching then, isn't it?" retorted the Doctor, who then looked up, noticing that more of the raisin-faced aliens were entering the immediate vicinity.

The two raisin-faced aliens had called in the cavalry, or, more accurately, the gang. There were plenty of gangs hanging around in the parks on what-were-Sundays-with-a-different-name but this particular gang was one of three gangs they really didn't want to run into, or be dragged into meeting. One of only two gangs containing a small ex-army human corps, their marksmanship was next to none and their imagination doubly so. The gang, all wearing the same grey overalls and carrying the same unnecessarily over-sized weapons, whispered quietly amongst themselves before turning in perfect military synchrony to face the three aliens and their blue magic box.

"They've turned to face us and they've got guns and they're standing in a line," stated Rory, a slightly hysterical tone sneaking into his voice, "This really doesn't look good. Do something, Doctor, you're normally good with the trigger-happy natives."

The Doctor was wobbling on his feet but seemingly unaware of it, putting the sensation down to something else that his conscious mind was too preoccupied to think about in any real detail. As a result, Amy and Rory placed themselves strategically either side of him in case he suddenly fell over, which they were more than expecting him to. His eyes, normally firing about wildly, were doing so with a clearly slower movement, instead seeming to drearily drag themselves from looking at one thing to another. His face emanated the slightest worry at his eyes being unable to move at their normal speed but this emotion was barely picked up by his two companions.

"Oh yeah," mocked the Doctor, "Real smart, get the semi-conscious, very ill alien to stop a gang full of extraordinarily – TCHOO! - creative madmen from killing us all in what I could imagine would be a very painful and unpleasant manner. Genius, Rory, perhaps you should start coming up with all the plans."

"Doctor!" pleaded Amy, from the corner of her mouth, "The big one's walking this way. He does _not _look happy."

"Of course he's not happy," retorted the Doctor, eyes drooping as he spoke, "He looks like a walking, talking raisin. I wouldn't be very happy if I looked like a raisin either."

"Yeah, but he's a walking, talking raisin in a bad mood with a big gun," hissed Amy, "Unless you come up with a plan in the next ten seconds, I'm going to personally volunteer you to go first to say hello."

The Lieutenant approached. He was an abnormally tall Spiringosian, the Doctor noted apprehensively as he walked closer. Nearly seven foot, the alien was beyond that of a virtual giant and reaching the realms of very real giant-hood. A tuft, quite literally a tuft, of bright blue, bright hideous neon blue hair sat on the top of his wrinkled mess of a face. His four eyes of startling red stared down at the Doctor, whom was a comparatively tiny being, with a contempt that was almost palpable.

Upon his plain grey pyjama-looking suit, on the shoulders, epaulettes were situated. These epaulettes were highly decorated with silver symbols, used to indicate his rank and achievements. Once realising what these achievements were, the Doctor wished that he wasn't as cultural as he was. Ignorance, occasionally, really was bliss. For the achievements noted on the Lieutenant's epaulettes were in a grouping the Doctor knew only to be 'bad'. Among the 'bad' grouping were activities such as interviewing, interrogation and torture. Apparently, the Lieutenant was something of an expert.

"Hello!" cheered the Doctor, choosing to ignore the very real danger he was in.

"You de owner of dat blue box?" asked the silhouetted Lieutenant as he plunged the trio into darkness with his shadow, "Zir?"

"The TARDIS?" asked the Doctor, noticing with a vague alarm that his eyes appeared to be blurring around the edges, "Yes. Why?"

"I don't think he wants to give you a parking ticket," stated Amy, watching the sick twisted smile that contorted the Lieutenant's face as the Doctor revealed that he was indeed the owner of said blue box, "Perhaps we should consider going for our mid-afternoon jog now, Doctor?"

"Wha - TCHOO! – are you on about?" began the Doctor before turning to face her, with an expression of genuine confusion, "Seriously, what mid-afternoon jog? ATCHOO!"

"_Doctor_," whispered Amy urgently, "_The _mid-afternoon jog to get away from _places."_

"… seriously, _Pond_," continued the Doctor, ignorance slapped on his face like make-up, "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"The mid-afternoon jog which we _always _go on when faced with terrifying-trigger-happy-aliens-that-want-to-kill-us." urged Amy.

"But we never," the Doctor paused as realisation finally dawned on him, "Oh, yes, _that _mid-afternoon jog…"

The Lieutenant signalled, almost invisibly, for his troops to move strategically around the area. Pairs stood at each of the possible escape routes obvious enough for the raisin-faced gang to assume they needed to cover. A smile, sitting upon the Lietuenant's face with unhealthy satisfaction, warned the trio that whatever happened next would definitely be bad, bad if they didn't do anything, that was. Taking a step forward, the trio took a step back, finding that their backs collided with the TARDIS, who was now emitting a heat that was almost scalding to their skin. Leaping upwards, the two humans moved away from the ship, flanking it and leaving the Doctor between a boiling TARDIS and a trigger-happy gang leader.

"You need t' come with uz." stated the Lieutenant simply.

"Really, - TCHOO! – do I?" asked the Doctor, barely noticing the steam his hand was producing every second it was in contact with the TARDIS's' frame, "Cause I'm really quite sure that I was told – TCHOO! - not to wander off with any gun-wielding strangers. I'd rather escape and run for my life, if I'm completely honest."

"You could try, but all de exits are covered."

"Almost all the exits are covered."

"Wha'?" asked the Lieutenant, frowning in confusion.

"Well," began the Doctor, passing Amy and Rory a look which they understood completely as they dived behind the blue box whilst the Doctor continued, "There's the one behind the TARDIS!" declared the Doctor before running behind the TARDIS with a speed that should have been simply impossible for someone so wobbly on their feet.


	5. Getting Worse

_A/N: Thanks again to those of you who are reviewing. Thank you once again to those who are reading and reviewing._

_Enjoy:_

**Cold**

**Chapter Five: Getting Worse**

'**Twenty minutes to save the world and I have a Post Office… and it's **_**shut**_**.'**

The grey towers strove high into the air, casting shadows into the grey alleys, which were no wider than five feet. The alleys converged on each other at perfect ninety degree angles, reducing the sort of turns in the city to only that of 'hard' lefts or rights. Above them, the clouds seemed to gather, casting a faded golden yellow onto the Grey Planet, bathing the area in a light that seemed to almost burn with a hopefulness that was otherwise devoid within the Southern Hemisphere. There was no pavement, there was only the grey floor, stretching out infinitely, creating a labyrinth or maze of dullness from which there was no escape.

Narrow as they were, the alleys amplified sound to a point where, on the silence of what was their equivalent of a Sunday, footsteps caused tremors throughout the entire city, with its inhabitants able to hear the triad of footsteps as they thundered around the resting city. There were three sets of steps. The first was a fast paced beat with fairly lengthy strides, pauses between each pound of shoe on pavement. The shoes themselves had a distinctively different sound to those of the others. Trainers sat on the feet of another, with a faster beat, as though its occupant were struggling to keep up. The third was a relaxed beat with shoes with barely any sole, pounding the cement with what was essentially, their feet wrapped in rubber.

"Are they even following us?" asked Amy, refusing to look back.

"Of course they've stopped following us!" snapped the Doctor, whose voice panted and wheezed, imitating the sound of his own ship when it attempted to materialise or dematerialise, "That's precisely why I can HEAR THEM BEHIND ME!"

"What're we going to do?" asked Rory, "Have you got a plan?"

"Nope," replied the Doctor, "Gave up on plans recently, they always go wrong anyway, so what's the point? No, new strategy is run until… ooh, I have a plan!"

"You just said you didn't!"

"Yeah, and since when did I need your permission to come up with plans?" retorted the Doctor, "Just shut up and listen carefully and," he broke off to yell, "I didn't say you could _slow _down! Keep running!"

They had, foolishly, made movements to slow down, to which the Doctor screamed at them to continue running despite their hearts protesting quite violently, considering they'd already run at least half a mile full pelt. Continuing to run, they observed that the Doctor was physically under a lot more strain than his tone, voice and attitude indicated. Sweat was, quite frankly, pouring off him. Individual tear-drop shaped globules of glistening diamond water fired off from his face as his long legs propelled his body a little faster into the run. His face had taken an unhealthy shade of red, as though he'd been burned by an over-excited sun. That, and his run was visibly wobbly, something which was only bad.

"We can't run forever, Doctor!"

"I know, Amy, which is why, in a while, I'm going to stop," ignoring the confused looks of his companions he continued, "You two are going to carry on except _they _won't follow you as long as they've got me – TCHOO!… I think."

"You _think_!"

"Quite frequently, yes," replied the Doctor, "Anyway, I'll give you two the sonic and I'll presumably be taken prisoner – TCHOO! – which'll leave you two free to do some traditional sneaking and… well whatever else it is you lot do when I'm not around. Oh! And take the psychic paper as well, I can – TCHOO! – send messages on it, keep you in the loop."

"And what about you? We're supposed to just leave you in the hands of some raisin-faced trigger-happy madmen and hope they don't kill you?"

"Basically, yeah."

"He really is stark raving mad."

"Think fast!" yelled the Doctor, lobbing the sonic screwdriver and frisbee-ing the psychic paper at them before slowing to a jog. He watched them run off, taking a sharp right before stopping and popping their heads back around the corner to watch him. He rolled his eyes, they had to watch didn't they? Couldn't just do what he said? Nope, they were his companions after all, and, as a general rule, the Doctor's companions never ever did what the Doctor told them to. He had once considered training them but had worked out that it would never work.

Slowing to a walk with a belated movement, the Doctor's head barely raised, barely turned, he barely recognised his assailants in that moment. His shoulders, abnormally, were ever so slightly slumped and he seemed quite unhappy. A sigh, disguised as a hideously violent coughing fit, passed his mouth. He turned as quickly as normal, attempting to disguise everything with an obvious façade of energy, vitality and youthfulness. Turning to face them, he found nothing but malice and frustration dripping from them and it filled him with mixed emotions he dared not express, as the dominant one at that time was fear.

To them, visible bags had appeared under his eyes and a coating of dankness had covered his skin. A paleness created an air of fragility and vulnerability which seemed as though it would never ever be expressed willingly. His eyes seemed slightly watery, as though ready to unleash a torrent at any moment, something which only cemented the view that he was dead on his feet. However, he still held himself the same way. Standing in his odd position, his arms bent at the shoulders, hands ready to flourish and fly around the place as words bled from his mouth with as much ease as music releases the soul.

"Yes?" asked the Doctor inquisitively.

"Yer comin' with us," began the Lieutenant whose face had briefly become smooth and soaked as sweat poured from his usually wrinkled brown complexion, "Or we're gonna knock ya out and denn take ya with us. Yer choice."

"You're giving me a – TCHOO! – choice?" asked the Doctor, "How very generous."

…**Amy and Rory…**

Distantly, hidden by a very sharp corner, the married couple watched. Amy clutched the screwdriver, as though doing so would provide physical and moral support to the alien who seemed he was about to fall over at any second. Rory, placing a supportive hand on the shoulder of his wife, a word he could scarcely accept himself as being true, observed the Doctor's behaviour with a parental sigh. The alien was simply incapable of handling things in a normal and effective manner. Even negotiating with dangerous gangs turned into an opportunity for witty remarks.

"He's completely insane, isn't he?"

"Duh!" agreed Amy, who turned to face him before tiptoeing away.

…**The Doctor…**

Aware that his two companions had undoubtedly begun their investigation of sneaking and hopefully not getting themselves caught or killed, the Doctor regarded the reaction his sarcastic comment had received. By the immediate reactions present, it was not good. Frowning, the Doctor began to wish, for the briefest of moments, that he had just kept his mouth shut. He was ill, dying, and he knew it. So annoying a large gang full of gun-wielders was probably not one of the brightest things he'd done that day, not that the day was going particularly well anyway.

"Yeah," began the Doctor in an almost whispered admittance of foolishness, "You don't like witty remarks much do you?"

"Nah, no' really."

"I think I'll go conscious then," requested the Doctor, walking towards them slowly, "Thanks."

Knowing, much to the Doctor's annoyance, that the Doctor was not to be trusted, the raisin-faced Spiringosians walked in a very set formation. The Doctor was in the centre of the formation, flanked directly by two trigger-happy soldiers, who, not so co-incidentally, were Sun and Gavin Five, the pair who had fired darts at the Doctor upon his arrival. Walking in front and behind of the pair and their prisoner, were two solid lines of four trigger-happy soldiers. The Doctor noted, with falling hearts, that the amount of trigger-happy soldiers rendered his Very-Clever-Plan-For-Escape pretty useless. Then again, he observed, all of his plans seemed to go wrong when he planned them in advance anyway.

"What're your names then?" asked the Doctor, determined, in his delirious state, to make conversation even if the recipients of said conversation didn't want to be involved with such an activity, "Named after stars on this planet, -TCHOO! - right?"

"Wha'?" asked Gavin Five, unable, to the disgust of the rest of the gang present, to keep his mouth shut, "How'd you know dat?"

"I travel," replied the Doctor, "A lot actually. Always end up revisiting the same places – TCHOO! Should make a checklist, really. Never had the time though. ATCHOO!"

"I'm Sun and 'e's Gavin Five," snapped Sun, "Now shaddup and leave uz alone."

The pause was a substantially long one considering that this particular pause was in the presence of the Doctor, and one of the more talkative incarnations of the Doctor at that. In this brief and short-lived silence, the synchronised marching of the gang members could be heard clattering around the echoing tunnels, releasing a terrifying and yet awe-strikingly perfect sound. Amongst this organised cacophony was a broken and deflated beating of footsteps that the Doctor correctly deducted as his own. Smiling, he eventually decided to break the silence, assuring himself that if he could get _any _information out of them about the TARDIS, _any _punishment they could dish out would be worth it.

"So, which gang is this? ATCHOO, Neutron or Red Giant?" he questioned, green eyes, despite his illness-induced delirium, flashing at frightening speeds, "I always get the – TCHOO! - confused."

"Neutron," hissed a Raisin behind him, "Now shaddup or we're gonna punch yer lightz ou'."

"Oh, oh," retorted the Doctor, "Well I very much don't – TCHOO! – like the sound of that. Still, you're quite very badly underestimating just how much that little blue box means to me – TCHOO! – so you clearly and utterly fail to realise that your stupid little 'threats' mean absolutely nothing. Now, tell me, who is your client?"

"You speak wit' confidence, little man," thundered the Lieutenant, "Wha' makes you think dat we're workin for jus' one clien'? Now keep quie' or you won' be attendin' yer appointmen' at all."

Begrudgingly, after having a gun nozzle jabbed into his neck, he gave in and decided to not question further, much to the silent gratitude of those present. Eventually, the group stopped. Having entered another large clearing of grey emptiness, of which there seemed to be many among the sign-less labyrinth, the convoy of trigger-happy soldiers halted. Hands on hips, Sun gestured uncaringly towards a large building before them that glared at them behind a hideous style that the Doctor was unfortunate enough to admit was of human architectural design. Like most human eras, architecture in the fortieth century suddenly realised how amazing the 60s had been, only to realise years later that the 60s was really quite a poor time for architecture.

The only redeeming feature of the building, in fact, was a glistening neon strip of bright red that burned and flashed as a stream of energy passed from one side of the building to the other at frankly terrifying speeds. Spray-painted onto the only visible entrance to the feudal fortress, a pair of grey double doors, was the word 'Neutron' in a shade of red that almost seemed to resemble that of ancient, dried blood. Only the Doctor and the Lieutenant continued, walking towards the double doors and waiting until they were opened from the inside with a resounding crunch of metal. Ever so slightly hunched, the Doctor was beginning to express visual features synonymous with a high fever.

…**Victoria Kingstanding Brown…**

"He shouldn't be standing."

"Well, 'e is."

"But he shouldn't. He shouldn't be able to stand. Crawl, maybe, but stand? No."

"Certain'e looks like 'e's standin'."

Victoria Kingstanding Brown rubbed her brow with her fingers, hoping, despite being aware of the futility of it, perhaps that she could massage the migraine out of her mind as simply as that. She had told them that she worked for an intergalactic policing organisation and she secretly thanked that they were stupid enough to believe her, or naïve enough to not bother with research themselves. The truth, the real truth, was many many times more complicated than that, but they didn't need to know that and neither did _he_.

"D'you wan' 'em t' bring 'im straigh' up 'ere?"

Victoria span elegantly on the spot, the loose, floaty bits of her loose black top swirling around her as the movement fluctuated violently the surrounding air particles. Her top was long-sleeved, and it was extremely tight-fitting. She wasn't particularly slim, carrying a small bit of fat around on her stomach, rendering the top looking slightly unattractive. This particular shirt also carried a hood which was, at that moment, being used. Despite wearing functional long combat trousers of charcoal black, her feet were protected from dirt and dust by completely impractical stilettos that were neither comfortable nor fashionable; instead choosing to sit upon her feet, attracting attention in the same way a fez would.

"No," she spat, her eyes as sharp, piercing and lethal as a three-pointed sword, "Lock him up in a dungeon room somewhere. If I'm to get what I want from him, he has to be desperate and on the verge of death. Make sure no one is posted immediately outside of his door, I am sure that he could talk them into releasing him."

"No problem," assured Neutron's elderly Leader, Pavikatnoon, "S'long as we get our money. Bu' jus' a small question. Wha' if 'e dies? Wha'll you do den?"

"He won't," stated Victoria, "He doesn't ever give up."

"Fair 'nough." stated Pavikatnoon before issuing the order.

…**The Doctor…**

"Where are you taking me?" queried the Doctor, whose voice was hoarse from a particularly violent coughing fit, "To the MedBay? ATCHOO! I could use a good MedBay right now. There's a good one on the TAR…"

"In dere!" roared the Lieutenant, sick of hearing the dying man's rambling, "NOW!"

Before the Doctor could slowly obey the Raisin's violently shouted orders, he was picked up and launched into the room. Feeling his tweed jacket tighten around his arms and shoulders as it was clasped by the wrinkled brown hand of the Lieutenant, the Doctor was alarmed as his feet disconnected from the ground. Suddenly unable to feel the rapid turning of the planet beneath and feeling gravity suddenly fight violently for the return of his body, his stomach rolled over in shocked disgust. Thrown into the cell, he felt air whoosh past him, air resistance tugging at him as he did so, whilst gravity fought savagely for his return. Gravity got what it wanted, his body collided uncomfortably and painfully with the cement-grey floor.

"Eurgh." groaned the Doctor as he used his two shivering arms to force himself to a sitting position. His eyes were slow in their movement, fading in and out of focus as a horribly vivid sense of vertigo gripped his head. Noticing his head lolling on his neck, he tried to bring it to a central position, only to find that it made his condition worse. He could feel his hair cling to his face, noting that droplets were beginning to roll down his face over an already dank sheet of sweat. Panting with a sigh that sounded more like the laboured breathing of a critically ill patient, he struggled to remove his tweed jacket.

He was upset about having to remove his tweed jacket, having become very attached to it since having picked it up, but he was suffering from a very severe fever and it was quite simply _dangerous _to keep the thing on any longer. He lay himself flat on the cold floor, finding it soothing to his dramatically over-heated body. His highly advanced hypothalamus was informing him that his body temperature, normally fifteen degrees centigrade, was in fact reaching thirty degrees centigrade. If it got much higher than forty, he would be in very very deep and unpleasant looking waters.

And if that wasn't bad enough, to top it off, his hearts were doing something they very definitely shouldn't have been. Each heart beat at roughly eight-five beats per minute each, though the actual break down was that his left heart was eighty-two beats per minute and his right heart was reaching eight-eight beats. This gave a total of approximately one hundred and seventy beats per minute. That was normal, except, that wasn't what his hearts were doing. His current pulses were a frankly terrifying three hundred beats per minute. Three hundred was very, very bad.

"Eurgh, TCHOO!" he grumbled as he struggled to his feet. They were weak and threatening to buckle and collapse beneath his weight. To his extreme discomfort, he could feel his trousers clinging to his legs. His shirt, which he as happy to ignore for the time being, was virtually soaked through; partly due to his refusal to take off the bowtie and loosen the damned thing. Walking over to the door like a man severely drunk or injured, he rapped weakly on its metal frame before collapsing to his knees before it. Muttering words which were incomprehensible even to him, the Doctor mentally poked the TARDIS, whose presence constantly sat at the back of his mind, just as Time itself did.

_How're you then, Ol' Girl? _he asked, his voice sounding as vibrant and lively as it did when he was healthy inside the contours of his mind. The question was redundant and pointless. He could feel what the TARDIS felt without having to ask. She was in the same state as him. Her circuits burned with hellish heat that scorched anything that touched them and the very core of her being was a fiery inferno of miscoloured light. She was ill and tired and she wanted to sleep, she wanted so badly to sleep, but she couldn't. As long as her Doctor was wandering an alien planet, she was unable to succumb to the illness.

That was not her reply, of course, she would, if she had any control over it, prevent her Doctor from feeling such things, but, as the way the world turned, she had no choice in the matter. She was, in fact, informing him that the plants in the glassroom were dying and that all the water in the pool had evaporated. The air-conditioning had exploded again and would need serious repairs and some of the more flammable rooms were becoming uncomfortably hot. Above all, though, the overriding message of her reply was her concern for him. For, as he could feel her circuits burning and her heart flaming, she could feel him.

The TARDIS could feel the Doctor's sweat clinging to his skin, clutching him with as much vigour as the virus clasped her. She could sense the Doctor's temperature burning him from the inside, and she could do nothing but snigger and nudge him affectionately as she noticed that his shockingly high temperature was partly due to his refusal to remove the apparently cool bowtie. His hearts though, were what deeply concerned her. They were racing at ridiculous speeds, frightening speeds and they were burning with fear. Fear for her and his companions. Stupid Time Lord.

_I know, I know, _he responded, _Still, can't say it's dull now can you?_

The TARDIS snickered and agreed with a silky purr.

_I need you to do me a favour._

Her response, a wonderfully high-pitched whirring, indicated that she would happily perform any action, even fly into a black hole.

_That's quite unnecessary, _the Doctor remarked, _Black holes are never a good thing to fly into, we've done it before and the results were _not _pretty. Anyway, I need you to look in the archives and see what you can pull up about the Hantatorialisengu Virus. However it got there, that's what's killing you._

A disapproving growling sound emanated around the TARDIS and sounded in the Doctor's mind via the surprisingly strong telepathic link that bonded them together.

_Oh, fine! _corrected the Doctor, _It's killing me as well, happy now?_

The TARDIS purred, to which the Doctor could only smile and roll his eyes.


	6. Fever Worsening

_A/N: Thanks to reviewers and readers alike._

_Here's the next chappie:_

**Cold **

**Chapter Six: Fever Worsening**

'**Yes, well, it's a brilliant noise. I **_**love**_** that noise.'**

"I _really _don't think we should have left him back there," worried Rory, his face was a picture of nurse-y concern, that was almost, if it weren't annoying, cute, "He looked like he was developing a fever."

Amy sighed, her heavy, emotion-laden sigh reverberating loudly, yet harmlessly, through the grey corridors that they had managed, quite successfully, to become hopelessly lost within. It took, Amy reasoned, a fair degree of skill to get yourself as completely and utterly geographically misplaced as they had managed. Swinging on her feet, and standing up tall, in complete disregard of the fact that they had been sneaking about in crouched movements for the past ten minutes. Hands on hips, her glare was one of pure, unadulterated irritability. In fact, if Irritability wasn't already a God in the only major religion on Spiringosa, Amy would have easily been mistaken for it.

"Look, Rory," she whispered harshly, her words hissing like serpents of entirely their own accord, "The Doctor sent us out here because he _knew _he couldn't get himself out of wherever it is they've taken him to. He wants us to find a way of getting him out."

"And, since when did you become an expert?" asked Rory, whose voice rolled with scepticism that did nothing but amplify the worry and concern that was present. He stood up tall as well, as though attempting to physically match and threaten his new wife. He was a nurse, he told himself with certainty, and his adopted patient was in deep deep waters.

"Whatever it is, he'll work it out!" whilst the beginning of the statement sounded like a declaration, it's continuation in a second sentence made it sound more as though an attempt to reassure herself than Rory, "He always does."

"Yeah, well, I don't fancy his chances if his illness gets much worse," began Rory, who quickly explained what he meant as Amy turned on him with burning eyes that were expressing visual, but temporary, contempt, "When he sneezed in the TARDIS, he was trying to say two. He thinks he has two days and that _includes_ today!"

"Then we'll have to get him the hell out of there by tomorrow," declared Amy, "Right?"

Amy, in a movement so swift that Rory barely noticed it as he sighed and raised his eyes to the surprisingly grey heavens, span on the spot and began marching once more along the grey maze of narrow corridors. Chasing after her with an uncontrollably goofy run, Rory lumbered after her, his footsteps pounding clumsily against the cement-grey floor. The two walked with great speed along the passageways, walking blind, as they had no working knowledge whatsoever of the city. Moments like this, wandering around alien cities on alien planets, the pair wished that the Doctor had given them something useful. Like a map. Though, Amy did secretly theorise that perhaps the Doctor was simply allergic to maps altogether.

After continuing along the paths, they eventually came to a park, though they had no idea where the park was or if the park was in fact in the vicinity of anything that could aid them in their quest. Letting loose sighs of fruitless frustration, the two plonked themselves down into the relative comfort of a grey bench. Looking out onto the grey cement slab of land that lay before them, they wondered in awe at the complete and utter lack of sound. There were no trees containing twittering birds, no leaves for the wind to rustle delicately against, no screaming children wailing as their ice cream melted into a slop of mess on the floor.

"It's a bit quiet, isn't it?" asked Rory.

"Yeah," agreed Amy, "I wonder where everyone is? Cities like this are normally buzzing. Where is everyone? They can't have all gone on holiday at exactly the same time!"

"Maybe there's been an evacuation or something," reasoned Rory, "The Doctor said the Southern Hemisphere was bad."

"You were _actually _listening to him?" interrogated Amy, turning to him with a perturbed and slightly horrified expression on her face. Clearly, the very concept of actually listening to, and remembering, what the Doctor said, was one of alien origins to her. Turning away she looked around before getting to her feet, having located a door within her field of vision, "Look, why don't we go and ask someone?"

Amy strode, with little more than her aforementioned query and finger-pointing as a warning, towards the grey door. Rory, a slightly exasperated emotion alighting upon his face, leapt up and doggedly drove after her. As the couple approached the door, its oddness began to settle firmly in their minds. It was the only door they had seen throughout their rather expansive search of the city, though precisely how much of that could actually be defined as searching was quite questionable.

The door could be little over five foot tall and its frame was firmly indented into the wall. There was no visible handle but to the top right of the door's frame was a small red button that sat upon a little rectangle that protruded from the wood. The actual door was painted, unsurprisingly, grey but was a shade of grey so dark that it was almost impossible to distinguish it from black when standing at a distance. Once they stood before it, they observed that words were inscribed into the door's wooden frame. The words warned against disturbance, claiming that danger lay within the confines of the building before them.

"There's a button." stated Amy simply, nodding towards it.

"How do we know anyone's home?" asked Rory, "And what about the warnings on the door? They look kind of ominous."

"Ominous?" queried Amy, her tone making evident her opinion.

"Yeah, you know, like 'death to all that ring' and 'within this abode dwells a beast'," read out Rory, "That kind of thing."

"I'm sure it's nothing," retorted Amy, pressing the button before Rory's half-open mouth could sound disapproval, "Besides, it's just a doorbell."

The red button was pressed into the white rectangle which held it. Sliding against the white material, the red circular object fell inwards, forced to do so by the aggressive finger. A loud ringing sound wailed around the inside of the building, seemingly directly behind the door, until the finger was removed and the red button returned to its rightful place. There was no answer for a long period of time and the pair were all but willing to return to their places on the bench when the door clicked open, sliding ajar, revealing a foot and a cautious being behind.

"Ello?" whispered the, audibly terrified, voice, "Who izzt? Wha' d'you want?"

"Oh, hi there!" exclaimed Amy, creating an immediate persona, "We're just tourists, we're a little lost and we dropped our guidebook, where are we?"

"Oh," the door opened a little bit wider, revealing what appeared to be an elderly Spiringosian in a patterned, floral, but still grey, dress, "You're on de Equator. It's why we all stay inside."

"Why?" asked Rory, "Is it too hot during the day?"

"No, no, nuffin' like dat, Dearie," replied the frail old voice, heavy with what they were beginning to realise was a Spiringosian accent, "It's jus' dat de gangs come up 'ere lookin' for recruits, so anyone in de righ' mind stays inside."

"Ah, okay, yeah, that makes sense," agreed Amy, "We've lost one of our friends, he's been kidnapped by a gang, is there anyone we can go to, like police or something?"

"Police?" laughed the old Spiringosian, "Been nuffin' like dat down 'ere for years, Dearie. If yer friend's been kidnapped den dere's only one ting ya can do for 'im."

"Which is?" asked Rory, lacking the patience at that moment to let the dramatic pause hang in the air for any longer than he had. His concern and worry as to the Doctor's condition was clearly far stronger in him than Amy had originally thought.

"Go to a rival gang," she replied, as though it were the most obvious solution ever, "If ya can pay 'em, dey'll be more dan 'appy to 'elp ya get yer friend back."

"And where can we find one of these gangs?" asked Amy, before Rory could sound his discontent as to the singularly violent solution, and the fact that there was no police force that was, either willing to help, or even in existence on Spiringosa.

"Red Giant iz de closest," informed the old lady, whose wrinkled raisin face was a million times more wrinkled than those they had seen before, "Take dat dere path and den de firs' left and den de second left and yer'll find dem in abou' three minute'."

Mentally noting the instructions given, Amy followed the wrinkled finger of the old lady to a passage that lay to their right, stretching out further into the monotonous grey labyrinth that could kill with the pure boredom it invoked due to its deathly still, identical streets. Nodding, the pair thanked the old lady before the door was slammed shut and they made their way towards the tiny pathway that the Spiringosian had pointed out. Conversation was impossible as Amy's walking pace made it impossible for Rory to keep up without engaging in a healthy jog to remain alongside her, thus rendering speech inconsistent; making it easy for Amy to feign a lack of comprehension.

…**The TARDIS…**

The inside of the TARDIS was bathed in a burning red colour. The warmth produced by the TARDIS was at a point where the entire console room was engulfed in sound. Fizzling could be heard as circuits and wires snapped and popped, protesting violently against the heat. Sizzling echoed about as the glowing metal veins of the TARDIS's engine scorched anything they touched. The glass floor was covered, littered with these black marks, turning the translucent material opaque. Though unseen through the scorched glass, the heart of the TARDIS bubbled away beneath the main console.

Normally contained in a blue glass, an alloy of Gallifreyan Zinc, one of the strongest known metals in the universe, the heavenly fury of the TARDIS's heart could be seen emanating from there. Cracks, varying in size, snapped and crackled along the blue material, revealing a silky golden slither of light as they lengthened and widened. From these small gaps, sudden bursts of vibrant light erupted. Flowing out violently into the console, bathing it in red, hellish flames, whispers could be heard within the light as small essences broke off and danced delicately in the dying time machine.

The TARDIS's monitor sprung into life, releasing a small patch of soothingly cold blue light into the otherwise flaming machine. Words appeared on the screen, scrolling upwards and downwards until something flashed a blindingly bright white, grabbing the attention of the time machine's consciousness. As though it were double-clicked, a more in-depth article on the subject appeared on the screen. A quick scroll up and down confirmed the machine's worst fears and, for the briefest of moments, all of her pain was drowned underneath a twisting tsunami of panic.

Probing outwards with her mind, she found her beloved Time Lord with little effort.

_You've found it then, eh? _replied the Doctor, his voice carrying an amused tone which echoed around the console room as though being sounded through a speaker, _Let's hear it._

A thundering, disapproving blast of sound powered throughout the censorious TARDIS. She was terribly unimpressed by his use of humour in respects to her concern over his condition. She had, unlike him, read the full file and the worry which raged in her blazing heart was justifiably panicked. How dare he make light of the disease which was killing them? How dare he make light of the disease which was killing _him_?

_Look, it'll be fine, I promise, I'm not going to let anything happen to you._

A twiddle of delicate, affectionate noise resonated about the console room, before being swiftly followed by a sceptical thudding clatter of sound.

_I always keep my promises!_

The sceptical clatter thudded loudly once again, and the Doctor backed down.

_Fair point, but that wasn't… okay, yeah, it was my fault… _his voice paused briefly, and the silence was filled with the crackles and whooshes of over-heating machinery, _Can you transfer the information to me? _

Scrolling once more through the file, the TARDIS mentally passed it on, a high-pitched 'whooping' sound indicating that it had been sent successfully.

_Thanks, Dear, _replied the Doctor whose dialogue murmured around the console, as if through speakers, whilst he read from the delivered mental files, _Oh well that's not too ba… oh… oh dear… that's very bad… ooh, very very bad… oh come on! How can it get much worse than… oh. Ah,_ the 'ah' affirmed that he had finished reading it, _They need to know about this._

Thunder rolled powerfully throughout the TARDIS, grumbling disapprovingly.

_No, they have to know. And you _know _what you have to do if this gets dangerous._

A brutal clash of sound ferociously thundered as her heart erupted vehemently.

_I am not leaving them on Spiringosa. Maybe if it was Earth, even in a different time zone, but not on Spiringosa. It's too dangerous and I don't trust Amy's ability to restrain herself from using the word 'raisin'._

Fury blistered the TARDIS's heart as another resounding boom reverberated around the console room.

_Oh, stop being stubborn! I need you to act as a half-way house for me and them. _

A curious shiver of sound bounced around the roundel-ed walls.

_Ha, yeah, I'm too… uh… I can't focus enough to send anything to the psychic paper._

The TARDIS unleashed a falling note of sympathy. She knew otherwise. He could focus just fine, there was never an issue with his ability to concentrate, which at times was so dogged that not even her mental presence could sway him from his focus. He was too weak. She could even feel the 'w' sound warble in her mind as the thought of saying the word crossed swiftly through his mind. The disease had rendered his psychic abilities weaker and without risking further injury, he was unable to send the message himself.

_Yeah, I didn't say that word for a reason you know, no excuse for _you _to use it. Anyway, can you do it?_

A proud whirring was quickly accompanied by a despondent utterance of sound.

_Ah. Okay, so you can't do it without destroying some of the circuits? Right, well, they're pretty important so we can't risk anything happening to them. So… ah! What about if I take _everything_, the whole virus, just for a few seconds? Would that be enough for you to send the message?_

Begrudgingly, a positive whirring noise affirmed the Doctor's theory to be true.

_Right, let's do that then!_

Concern bled from the TARDIS's heart as she pleaded that he find another way.

_Stop trying to change my mind. I'm just as stubborn as you, remember? Right, now, on the count of three. One…_

The TARDIS compiled the message, rearranging it and ordering it on the monitor. She was sure that if she could create the message before he had finished counting down, she could reduce the length of time she'd need to send it, thus preventing her Time Lord from suffering for too long. Mind you, she observed, it was his own stupid idea. He always had stupid ideas like that. She was still trying to work out why she put up with him.

_Two… and stop moaning about me, I _can _hear you…_

The final touches to the message were the Doctor's own vocal patterns. It was a simple, trivial matter to change the wording so that it sounded like something that would rattle its way from the Doctor's mouth during one of his rambles. Additionally, through her own choice, she decided to shape the words so that they resembled the Doctor's handwriting when he wrote with European Earth languages. She'd seen him write many times, as he had spent many hours labouring over his book on Time Lord Civilisation, so her replication was perfect.

_Three! … ARRRRGH!_

Frantically, the TARDIS sent the message to the paper, providing the psychic paper with the means to place the message on a loop so that it would replay the message should it disappear to quickly for the couple to read it. It was a short process but the cries of her driver, with whom she shared an inextricably complicated bond, slowed her down. His screams reverberated throughout the console room and for every second that passed, the intensity of these cries seemed to increase; increasing the TARDIS's own panic.

Once the message was sent, the TARDIS snatched back her half with little care as to the sudden shock of pain that would impose to herself. The cry abruptly ceased and her mental connection to the Doctor dimmed significantly, alerting her to the fact that he had fallen unconscious. Alone once more, the TARDIS was left only with the Eleventh Doctor's playlist to occupy herself with, to distract her from the pain that shot through her circuits and her heart. Activating the playlist through a menu visible on the monitor, the TARDIS unleashed a whoosh of sound from a piston that resembled, to an untrained human ear, that of a sigh. The Eleventh Doctor, she noted, had very poor music taste.

…**Amy and Rory…**

"Uh, Amy, Amy!"

"What now?" snapped the exasperated Amy Williams.

The psychic paper had been handed to them folded inside out, as in the white of the usually blank paper could be see at all times. It was sitting, and poking out of, Amy's left-hand jean-skirt pocket. Rory could see that words, clearly in the Doctor's neat-yet-somehow-scruffy-at-the-same-time handwriting protruding from the bit of the plain paper that could be seen. He pointed to it, briefly at a loss as to what to say in order to draw Amy's attention to the psychic paper, aware that it was clearly a message from the Doctor.

Following the finger which Rory had pointed at her jean-skirt, which was, as much of her wardrobe was, very very short. She noticed that he was pointing at the psychic paper and she immediately pulled it out of her pocket, having noticed that there was writing scrawled upon it. Staring at it, she attempted to read it, aware that Rory was sneaking towards her to read over her shoulder. The pair read and it was Amy who eventually decided to read the thing out loud, as Rory's over-the-shoulder reading was irritating her quite profusely.

"Han-ta-tor-i-a-lis-en-gu, Hantatorialisengu Virus," pronounced Amy, struggling to say the word without phonetically breaking it up first, she broke off from her reading to inform Rory that, "Jeez that's one hell of a word."

"The message, Amy," stated Rory, more concerned as to the possibility that it may be the Doctor informing them of developments in his condition, "What does it say?"

" 'Hantatorialisengu Virus, it's one hell of a mouthful and it's one hell of a virus; it was originally found on Giselinka Nine and it's a very very aggressive virus which attacks the immune system. It is lethal to pretty much every lifeform in the universe and it's hard to notice because it gives the symptoms of the common cold, until the later stages, where it just goes plain nasty.' "

Amy paused for breath where there was none indicated on the psychic paper. It was certainly the Doctor, they ascertained. Only one being in the universe was capable of having one sentence with so few commas or breaks for breath. The Doctor, they discovered was definitely alien, simply for the reason that he could talk at a million miles an hour without breathing. Had they ever asked him how he manages it, he would have explained to them that a Time Lord's respiratory bypass system can be manipulated in such a way as to lessen the necessity to breathe whilst speaking. After this short pause, however, Amy was urged to continue by Rory whose nurse-y concern continued to glisten in his eyes.

" 'The good news is that there is a cure, it was synthesised by a small army of doctors in the middle of nowhere. The bad news is that the virus kills in one day, in my case, I can extend it to two, three at a push. In the later stages, my hearts may stop, Rory, if it comes to that, you have to perform compressions on both sides of my chest or you'll only restart the one heart and if you only restart the one, the chances of me surviving drop to around the region of 2%. Good luck and try not to get yourselves killed. xx Doctor.' "

There was a long pause.

"Well, isn't he just a barrel of optimism?"


	7. Moving Forward

_A/N: Thanks once again to reviewers and readers alike._

**Cold**

**Chapter Seven: Moving Forward**

'**Just had a fall, all the way down there right to the Library; hell of a climb back up.'**

The Doctor had never liked waking up. He had never really liked falling asleep. As such, waking up was a very short process for the Time Lord who immediately sprung to his feet upon realising that he had been unconscious, usually, mere seconds beforehand. This characteristically energetic spring did little but cause problems as a tsunami of vertigo flushed into him, prompting him to collapse into a cross-legged sitting position on the floor. For a while, the swirling sensation in his head prevented him from realising the effects of the virus. Unfortunately, however, the virus was unnecessarily persistent in being recognised.

"Eurgh," grumbled the Doctor, whose mind briefly threw up the thought that no one was around to hear him before being promptly shot down by the acknowledgement that it rarely stopped him anyway, "Eurgh. This is – TCHOO! – really truly very actually quite unpleasant. ATCHOO! Eurgh."

His mind, without his permission, he added quickly, indexed precisely how the virus had progressed whilst he had peacefully slept. His hearts had increased their joint pulse to a shocking three hundred and fifty beats per minute and it was so strong that he could feel their double-beats throughout his entire body. His throat continued to feel clogged up and his nose was still sniff-ly and horrible. He'd continued to sweat profusely but this appeared to have done little in the way of actually cooling him down. He _felt _cold but his mind told him otherwise.

His fever, in fact, appeared to have worsened as he slept as his hypothalamus quickly informed him that his body temperature had crept upwards from thirty degrees centigrade to thirty two degrees centigrade, which was wholesomely bad. He had already discarded his tweed jacket, as, if he continued to wear it, it would undoubtedly have been, at some point, responsible for his untimely death, though the act of taking off the jacket had done little to control his rapidly rising temperature. After some deliberation, which was, he later explained, painstaking, he decided that the bowtie had to be removed.

"I'm – TCHOO! – uh, sorry," began the Doctor, untying the bowtie with a wounded expression of guilt visible amongst the sweaty contours of his flushed red face, "About this, Mr Bowtie, but, if you stay – TCHOO! – on, you're uh, going to indirectly be responsible for my death, so, uh, you're gonna have to live in my pocket for a bit."

Removing the bowtie as though it were the corpse of a great and well respected man, he delicately placed it in his trans-dimensional pockets. At least there it would be safe from harm, he reasoned. The removal of the bowtie allowed him to undo the top three buttons of his shirt which allowed for a huge, but brief, influx of cold air to dance upon his burning, boiling chest before heat took over once more. Thinking further into ways of cooling himself down, he decided to roll up the damp sleeves of his shirt, which from that moment on, clung to his elbows as though clinging onto life itself. The removal of his boots and socks allowed his feet to freeze for a short time from their contact with the icy-cold floor of the cell.

"I feel naked without my bowtie," murmured the Doctor like a child who had just realised what a fool they had been for taking the lollipop over the ice cream, "Maybe I should – TCHOO! – put it back on…"

The opportunity to put the bowtie back on, however, was starved from him by activity outside his cell door. A small army of boots pounded the cold cement floor outside, engulfing his room in deafening echoes. Looking towards the door with inexorable curiosity, the Doctor watched as the Lieutenant approached the thick metal grey door. Beside him were three or four, perhaps more, soldiers of raisin-skin tone, all, no doubt, heavily armed and far too eager to unleash their barrage of bullets into anything that moved without their permission.

The door swung open with a heavy clang that shuddered painfully through the developing migraine storm in the back of the Time Lord's head. Visibly flinching away from the sound, the Doctor was unable to observe the curling cat-like smile of the Lieutenant as he realised that the Doctor had been silenced by his entry. Feet of lead collided with the floor, creating a resounding thud that could be emulated only by the unfortunately familiar sound of a body collapsing to a hard and uncaring floor. The Doctor looked up and attempted to sigh. This sigh, however, led to a heart-wrenchingly painful-sounding coughing fit that returned no sympathy from the soldiers at the metaphorical castle gates.

"Yer comin' with uz now." stated the Lieutenant coldly.

"Sure, sure, okay," mumbled the Doctor, attempting to drag himself to his two feet by pushing upwards with his shaking, shivering arms, "Just give me a second, okay? Still feeling a bit woozy. Well, I say a bit – TCHOO! – woozy. 'M feeling very woozy actually. Very – TCHOO! – very woozy. Eurgh."

With his attention irrevocably diverted to – what was, at the time, the very complicated process of – getting to his two feet, the Doctor was completely unaware of the Lieutenant's movements. A sudden grip tightened around his upper left arm and launched him to his feet at speeds that severely aggravated the muscles attaching his left arm to the rest of him. Uttering a brief growl of discomfort, the Doctor quickly frowned at his captor, before weakly pushing off the hand and steadying himself on his feet as they swayed feebly beneath him.

"That was completely unnecessary," snapped the Doctor, whose bunged-up voice severely deprived his voice of the usual authority which it desperately required at that very moment, "I am quite capable of – TCHOO! – walking myself."

Shifting slowly towards the door, legs quite obviously threatening to buckle beneath him with every step that applied pressure to them, the Doctor was greeted at the door with handcuffs. Immediately sandwiched between two pairs of trigger-happy trainees, the Doctor was bungled away from the narrow grey corridor. Much to his annoyance, the Lieutenant liked taunting to a point where it was wholesomely irritating and the trainees enjoyed shoving and pushing him equally as much. His trip to wherever it was he was actually going was a memorably unpleasant one.

…**Amy and Rory…**

Rory glared. It was just like the time when they were in Venice. Except maybe for the fact that the entire situation was a couple of times severely worse. They were in the base of a very dangerous gang who had chosen to call themselves 'Red Giant'. The insides of their compound, understandably, had red splatters of paint, though Rory was increasingly under the impression that it wasn't paint, which just made the whole thing worse, really. And there they were again, trying to work with the crazy, gun-totting psychopaths but it was absolutely fine because they had incredible acting skills and their story was totally believable. Or at least, that's what Amy had tried to convince him of. Reality was quite different.

"Greetings on this fine Spiringosian… uh… day," pronounced Amy, doing so with a learned and trained English accent that she had fought ferociously against in all other situations, "We've come for your aid and are willing to pay for your services. We're tourists from a… distant world and a gang has kidnapped our alien… butler… we want his safe return."

Rory resisted the urge to leap over to Amy, grab her wrist and run the hell out of the building before the gang could see through there not so clever plan to rescue the Doctor. They'd had worse plans, he assured himself, but this was definitely in the top ten for its very simple suicidal quality. Having already been killed on several different occasions, through a variety of different methods, Rory was absolutely positive that being shot at by a gang of angry raisins was not the way he'd want to go if he was to ever go properly, not that that was something he particularly wanted to do anyway.

"Of course," nodded the Leader of Red Giant, who, strangely enough, spoke with a very pronounced and correct accent. Evidently, he had been trained to speak without the inherently difficult-to-understand Spiringosian accent, "How much?"

"Uh," began Amy, pausing briefly to look back and pass a desperate 'help me' look towards Rory, whose responding look was one that indicated that he was at a complete loss as to what sort of response wouldn't end up with them lying in a bloody, bullet-ridden heap on the floor, "Well, we're unaccustomed to the value of money on your planet so, if we were to provide you with our credit details, we trust that you would withdraw a suitable amount?"

"Naturally," replied the Leader, with a greedy smile lighting up his elderly raisin-ised face. Taking to his feet and waltzing away from his ornate metal chair, he walked towards them, evidently aware that his grey cape fluttered about powerfully behind him as he moved, "Now, let us discuss the details of this venture."

It was clear from the Leader's movements that he meant for them to go on a walk around the grey and suitably monotonous complex and so Amy was allowed a brief few seconds of facial communication whilst her back was turned to the gang leader. Her expression, to Rory's immediate dissatisfaction, was one of victory. She thought that they were safe and that the whole thing was 'in the bag'. Rory, however, ever the sceptic, was more concerned as to how they were going to rescue the Doctor without initiating a gang war that could end up with them lying bloody and bullet-ridden in the middle of the crossfire. Sighing, Rory loyally followed Amy as the couple were led around the complex whilst conditions for a contract were laid down verbally.

…**TARDIS…**

_They're taking me to see someone, I think… I hope, _rambled the Doctor's voice throughout the console room, _'Cuz if they're _not_ taking me to see someone, I could be in quite a big problem. Don't suppose you're well enough to 'materialise to the rescue' if they _do _decide to blindfold me against a wall?_

A deflated whirring indicated the negative.

_Oh well, _sighed the Doctor, _It was worth a go, eh?_

Being mentally in touch with Amy and Rory, though the couple were completely ignorant of this fact, worried the TARDIS at the moment she observed their apparently ingenious plan. They were buying the services of a rival gang in order to rescue the Doctor, under the pretences that they were rich married tourists who had had their alien butler kidnapped by Neutron. It was a poor cover story that wouldn't stand up to much investigation, but luckily for them, Red Giant was only ever interested in money.

_What? They're going to get a rival gang involved? What are they thinking? _

That was precisely the concern that the TARDIS had expressed up until she had discovered they're cunning plan to avoid unnecessary deaths. They were going to dock the payment by a thousand Spiringosian dollars for every Neutron soldier that was killed. A clever little trick that would, undoubtedly, be enough to make Red Giant think twice about slaughtering their rivals. Money was a surprisingly powerful motivator on Spiringosa, particularly in the Southern Hemisphere where a thousand dollars could but you everything you wanted for the rest of your life. Sometimes, a complete unawareness of currency was very, very useful.

_Oh, well that's okay… they can be really quite clever sometimes, can't they? Oh I love humans. Still can't understand why most of the rest of the Universe doesn't. They're usually a wonderful and innovative and… wait… ALIEN BUTLER? ALIEN BUTLER? I take it all back. They're stupid. Stupid, simple, offensive apes._

Laughter came in the form of a variety of sounds that just about loud enough to blot out the continued squeaking and squealing of the metal as it snapped and cracked against the TARDIS's insides. Though usually more subdued, the TARDIS laughed quite a fair bit. Certainly, it was subtle enough for the humans to not notice, but then again, the Doctor had had many, many years to become accustomed to her subtle behavioural patterns as expressed by the popping, whirring and whooshing of various bits of machinery.

_Oh, fantastic, thanks for laughing, very subtle, very encouraging, _snapped the Doctor, _Can you give them some credit details on the psychic so they can pay them? The Leader could get a bit suspicious if they don't give him anything, mind you, how he didn't become suspicious just by _looking _at them I'll never know 'cuz they look proper suspicious to _me _at the best of times._

Agreeing begrudgingly, the TARDIS fired a sequence of numbers and contacts onto the psychic paper, making sure, yet again, that the thing was rotated on a loop. As the amount of information being transferred was significantly smaller, the TARDIS could handle the stress of sending it whilst battling off the effects of the illness. However, the TARDIS quickly became distracted, after a short silence had elapsed, by the events proceeding down the Doctor's end of things. He had, she understood, a way with trouble, and she had, always, patiently sat through a large number of electrocutions, shootings and muscle pains. Nonetheless, every single time something happened to him, her heart burned with the raging fury of the time vortex.

_Oh dear._

…**Amy and Rory…**

"How can they possibly be believing us?" whispered Rory, once assured that they were out of earshot, "Seriously, it's even worse than our first cover story."

"Yeah, well…" Amy trailed off whilst walking through the corridors, before turning to Rory and sharply continuing her cleverly deducted reasoning with, "Shut up!"

Rory bit his lower lip as the couple followed the Leader of Red Giant, named Ghveti Tani One, down the narrow corridors whose grey nature was occasionally disrupted by splatters of red paint. They had been assured that most of it was paint, and that any slight dulling of the red, indicated otherwise. Ghveti Tani One was out of earshot, or hearing range anyway, when Rory had queried his wife as to the ingenuity of their very flawed plan. It was further along the corridor, that Ghveti Tani One took a sharp left and lead them into a vast room whose size meant that every syllable was echoed and strengthened in volume.

"Do you think he's okay?" asked Rory, referring to the Doctor only by a slight vocal inflection on the 'he' that would have been all but unnoticeable to anyone who didn't understand the context of the situation.

"Of course, he's okay," retorted Amy sarcastically, "That's why he's half-dead and kidnapped."

"He's rubbing off on you," stated Rory, "You weren't this sarcastic before."

Amy rolled her eyes. She was controlling her accent superbly in the presence of members of Red Giant and Rory had never known her keep up an English accent for so long in his entire life. Normally, she'd last about two minutes before throwing her arms up in the air, sighing exasperatedly and ranting about what an incredibly boring and stupid accent everything that wasn't Scottish is. Though, having known her for a long period of time, he could see the faintest lines of stress rippling across her face as she attempted to withhold feelings of aggression towards the accent that was spewing out of her mouth.

"So, you shall pay us the sum of two million Spiringosian dollars for the safe return of your alien butler, whom you have named Dave," began Ghveti Tani One, motioning his hands towards a couple of raisins standing in the corner, "This task will require the infiltration of Neutron's base, recovery of the target and his safe return to you. Is there anything else?"

The raisins that had been called over shuffled towards the trio. Two, one situated at either end, were carrying a table upon which a plain piece of paper and a pen were situated. The table was placed in between the gang leader and the married couple. One of the raisin's, whose hair was a shock of brilliant orange, speedily wrote down the terms of the contract on the paper before safely joining his friend on the other side of the building. The fact that the two had run out of the room at speeds that were, frankly, quite disturbing, deeply unsettled Rory, though it appeared as though Amy had barely even noticed.

Ghveti Tani One indicated that they should approach the table. He was a large Spiringosian, and appeared overweight at a second's glance. His face, due to the nature of his eating disorder, was surprisingly smooth, lacking the distinctive wrinkles that likened the majority of the species to raisins. His four startling yellow eyes seemed alive with intelligence and success. Certainly, his clothes seemed to indicate his success. A grey, tailored suit sat comfortably over a plain grey waistcoat which, itself, covered up a white shirt which was accompanied by a red tie. Sitting over this arrangement of stylistically twenty-first century clothing was a velvet cloak of vibrant blood red that fluttered about powerfully behind him as he moved.

The couple approached the table and were invited to read the contract, to assure that everything was as they wished it to be. Once they had read the document, a pen of red was placed in Amy's hand by Ghveti Tani One as his face contorted with a self-satisfying grin that was all too synonymous with greed for their comfort. It was at that moment that Amy realised that it was worth adding their condition before signing up to the contract.

"Before we sign," began Amy, holding the pen mere centimetres from the paper, "Just one more condition."

"But of course," agreed Ghveti Tani One, "Anything you desire."

"Don't kill anyone," stated Amy, her eyes burning with a fire of non-negotiability, "For every person you kill, you'll lose a thousand dollars."

"… I understand," nodded Ghveti Tani One, nodding begrudgingly as his fake smile continued to sit upon his brown, not-quite-so-wrinkled face, "You wish to avoid scandal falling upon your names. Fair enough, we shall not take lives."

Amy and Rory promptly signed, whereupon, they were asked to give their credit details. Staring at each other with brief expressions of panic, Rory's eyes fell upon the psychic paper. Pulling it out of her pocket, Amy was relieved to find that the Doctor, or what they thought at the time to be the Doctor, had already transferred credit details onto the paper. Passing the details on, they were informed by Ghveti Tani One that it was quite late and that it would, perhaps, be better if they were to stay the night there whilst preparations were made.

…**The Doctor…**

"Oh dear."

The Doctor looked around the room. He did not like the room. He did not want to be in the room. He did not, he stressed, want particularly to be anywhere _near _the room. It wasn't a very nice room. It was worse, even, than the tiny cramped little cold grey cell they'd dumped him in hours earlier. It was a large room, and warm, but by no stretch of his often over-active imagination, was it good. It wasn't even _not bad_. It was simply, quite simply, an awful room which he had no intention of occupying for longer than the two seconds he had been when he made his utterance of discomfort and disdain.

"Won' ya take a seat?"

The Doctor blinked furiously as his bleary eyes conveyed a blurred image of the room swathed with colour. He tried to steady himself as the two hands that had previously been clamped onto his elbows released. His knees immediately rebelled against him, threatening to buckle violently beneath his weight. Noticing, despite his failing eyesight, that there was a chair in the middle of the room, he attempted to dash towards it, finding instead that he tripped over it, landing face first on the floor in a feverish mess.

"Dat ain' quite wha' I meant."

"Eurgh. ATCHOO!" retorted the Doctor, attempting to pull himself onto what his vision then revealed to actually just be a stool, and a small one at that. Frowning, he decisively placed himself on it, vaguely aware that his mind was all but ready to fall asleep, "It's not a seat. It's a _stool_. ATCHOO! No, no, it's not a _stool, _it's a speck, a speck of dust. ATCHOO! You can't seriously expect me to sit on a speck of dust?"

There was a long pause through which his pervasively loud, laboured breathing could be heard echoing loudly. Within the breathing, which itself sounded more akin to heaving, was a thick, sticky undertone. It sounded as though he were attempting to breathe through a film of unpleasant material with roughly the same consistency as either phlegm or snot or the two of them put together. His breathing, certainly, did not sound healthy by any stretch of the imagination and his coughing fits, when the occasionally penetrated the air particles in the surrounding area, where unnervingly severe.

"We wan' one ding and one ding alone," explained a Raisin, whom the Doctor presumed to be the Leader of Neutron, though, through his hazy illness, the Doctor found himself with the innate feeling that he didn't actually _care _who it was, "Give uz wha' we wan' and den we'll leave you and yer buddies alone."

Unable to keep his head straight, or even upright, the Doctor found that it kept lolling about all over the place, as though it were a cat attempting to find a comfortable position in which to nap for the proceeding five hours or so. His hearts, similarly, were working overtime in a clear attempt to confuse him into losing count. Every five minutes, his pulses would alter dramatically, varying from his resting heart rates of one-hundred and seventy to a shocking four hundred and twenty. It was as though his body was attempting to confuse him into falling asleep and forgetting about the whole ordeal of being fatally infected.

"Yeah?" he asked sleepily, "Well, leaving me alone won't – TCHOO! – help me get the antidote… the cure… the antiviral drug… and without that, - TCHOO! – I'll die, so you're not really being very persuasive here, are you? Can I suggest bribery? ATCHOO! Bit of chocolate? The cure maybe?"

"We'll give you de cure if you tell uz wha' we wanna know."

The Doctor, whose face was as flushed as a boiling lake of lava found inside an active volcano, smiled slightly. His entire body was coated with a thick lining of sweat that seemed only to accumulate with each passing second. His bowtie, had, during the course of his walk to the room, been returned to its position around his neck, though his shirt was still undone. The fact that the bowtie was now attached to his neck, as opposed to his shirt collar, served only to make the act of wearing a bowtie look even more ridiculous. It was surprising, to all present, that it were even possible to manage such a feat.

"I'll be more than happy to – TCHOO! – help," replied the Doctor, whose voice had rapidly become hoarse, resembling strangled whispers more than normal speech, "Though – TCHOO! – that – TCHOO! – depends entirely on what exactly you want to know. If you want to know the history of the human race, or my favourite painting, feel free to ask away! Though – TCHOO! – I'm not too sure what the names of the moons are in the Red Sector, but that's 'cuz I've never really been to the Re-"

"Give uz de Secrets of Time, Time Lord."

The Doctor wheeled backwards over his stool. Landing sharply on his back, his face crunched inwards to express a brief all-encompassing pain that was quickly overcome as the statement settled in. He pulled himself back onto his chair, though he only got half-way through the action before deciding that he was too tired to try something so taxing and that he'd just sit on the floor until his vision cleared up and stopped blurring everything together. A vertigo totalled his mind, but, thankfully, because he never thought in a straight line anyway, the vertigo did nothing but confuse everything in his head except his thought processes.

"Sorry?" whispered the Doctor's torn and savaged voice, "What? I don't think I heard you properly. Could you speak a little louder, please? Perhaps with less of an accent."

"De Secrets of Time, now!"

Again, expressing facial illustrations synonymous with that of being slapped in the face with a fish, the Doctor frowned with a confusion that seemed simply incapable of understanding the statement that had gone before. The Doctor, as though doing so would somehow aid his cognitive functions, rubbed his face with his two hands. Sighing with a flurry of burning hot air, his response was overtaken by a fit of coughing that forced him onto his hands and knees briefly. Wiping away the remnants of phlegm that sat on his bottom lip, he looked upwards and frowned, before attempting to speak.

"I'm not sure," he explained slowly, "I understand."

"De Secrets of Time! NOW!"

"Oh. _Oh._"

The Doctor turned away, his face immediately obscured by his back as he tucked his chin onto his chest. His pupils faded in and out of focus as they fled fearfully from one corner of his eyes to another. His lips rattled off silent words that slithered through the singing silence like snakes; filled with venom and surprise. His hands, shivering and shaking from a feeling of cold that was directly contradicted by his hypothalamus, waved about in front of him, as though fending off an attack from the air itself. Sitting sharply upright, as though some revelation had suddenly grasped him by the neck, he swivelled back round, eyes focused and staring straight at his captor with a myriad of emotions so complex and simple at the same time that it was utterly mind-boggling.

"No."

"Zorry, Zir?"

"No, no, no. No. Do I have to describe the definition of the word to you?" snapped the Doctor, rising to his feet with movement so natural that it appeared, for a few seconds, that he had been cured of the illness which tore at his insides, "Do I have to write it down on paper for you? Do I have to translate the word into five billion different languages for you to understand? No. No, no, no, no. No. Never. Never ever."

"You will give uz de Secrets of Time or you will die."

"Then I'll die, thank you very much for nothing, you raisin-faced, wrinkled, sitting-in-a-bath-tub-for-too-long, out-of-space, not-very-nice person," the Doctor spat as his eyes burned with a defiance so fierce that his immediate change of expression to one of regret was nothing short of comical, "And that was a really stupid thing to say, wasn't it?"

The Leader of Neutron did not give the Oncoming Storm the nod which he knew was coming. Instead, a curled fist of wrinkled, brown skin collided with the Doctor's face.

…**Victoria Kingstanding Brown…**

" 'E didn' give uz anyting, a' all," snapped Pavikatnoon as he paced the room, " 'E insul'ed me dough and I don' take too kindly to dat. 'Ow painful is dis illness again?"

"He'll tell us what we need to know," assured Victoria, "He loves his stupid machine and his companions too much to leave them without a driver to whisk them away to safety. He might very well tell us as his hearts beat their last, but he _will _tell us."

"Yeah?" hissed Pavikatnoon, "Well, 'e better do i' soon 'cuz I don' 'ave de patience to deal wit' apes like 'im."

Victoria rolled her eyes. She would have what she wanted. Whether it killed the Last of the Time Lords and his TARDIS or not.


	8. Interrogation Continuing

_A/N: Thanks once again to readers and reviewers._

**Cold**

**Chapter Eight: Interrogation Continuing**

'**Football. That's the one with the sticks, yeah?'**

**The Next Day**

Once the Doctor had woken up, a few meagre minutes after being plunged into unconsciousness by a wrinkly, brown fist, he had discovered that he was back in his cold cell. His tweed jacket was the only thing he had to act as a bed but he didn't really need a bed, as it turned out, because he was too busy fidgeting fitfully to get any sleep whatsoever, not that he normally slept anyway. Several things were bothering him and when things bothered him, he didn't sleep, it was why he didn't really do a lot of sleeping at all because there were plenty of things in the Universe to bother him. Plenty.

His condition had only worsened overnight. The fever had gone up and his body temperature was an extremely unhealthy thirty six degrees centigrade, average for a human maybe but deadly to a Time Lord. His hearts were pumping at the same hysterically unsafe rate as they were throughout the entire night, which was, in some respects, a godsend because if his hearts had gone much faster, he'd have been facing the very real risk of a hearts attack. His body was covered in goosebumps and he was shivering, coated in so much sweat that he was quite sure he could refill the TARDIS's swimming pool with just what could be found in his clothes.

Despite his immensely bad body heat, he felt cold, felt as though he were sitting in a deep freezer and he, unfortunately, had had his fair share of experience inside a deep freezer. His tweed jacket was lying over him and his knees had been tucked into his chest regardless of the physical discomfort this seemed to cause him. His eyes were closed and the skin immediately around them was sunken and dark. He was pale and clammy and producing far more heat from his body than was healthy for his species. Inside his throat, a thick lining of phlegm sat, prohibiting his voice from sounding normal.

"You up?"

It took a while for the words to register in his head, to his surprise and horror. Once they had settled within his head, he realised that it were a question and groggily pushed himself to a sitting position. Now sitting, the bleary eyed Doctor looked towards the small rectangular barred gap which was now the frame of a Raisin's wrinkled face. Though unable to work out who precisely that particular Spiringosian was supposed to be, the Doctor had the innate feeling that they weren't there for a good reason.

"S'pose you are den," continued the Spiringosian, whom, to the Doctor's ignorance, was in fact Gavin Five, sent to retrieve the Doctor from his cell in order to continue his conversation with Pavikatnoon, "Alrigh', de boss wan's to see ya now."

The massive door of metal and muscle swung open, bathing the room in blinding bright light that forced the Doctor's eyes into immediate squinting mode. Silhouetted against the light, Sun and Gavin Five approached him. The Doctor made no attempt to stop their approach, nor did he make any indication that he was even aware of their approach. Considering his talkative attitude just a day earlier, the transformation took his young captors considerably off-guard. They were expecting to walk into a string of sentences containing very interesting, but very useless, pieces of information. What they found instead was a semi-conscious alien caught in a delirium induced solely by a particularly nasty virus.

"Can ya walk?" asked Sun.

"-" began the Doctor, his voice emerging as a breathless pant, "No, not really. ATCHOO! ATCHOO! I'm afraid not. You might just have to carry me. Don't worry though, I'm not very heavy. Or at least I wasn't. Still haven't done a full medical examination of myself. She keeps telling me I should but, well, never had the time…"

Sun looked toward Gavin Five, whose expression mirrored his own. So much for a silent journey. It became increasingly apparent that even when being torn apart by a lethal virus, the Doctor continued to spout facts and stories whose usefulness was always quite questionable. The Doctor tried to drag himself to his feet and he was doing well. Well, he was doing well until his knees protested and plunged him towards the ground faster than his arms could shoot outwards to limit the damage of the fall. Face on floor, the Doctor groaned, finding himself immediately picked up by his two arms.

"Eurgh," grumbled the Doctor as he was drag-carried throughout the compound back towards the room whose very make-up caused a feeling of sickness to swell up within his swollen stomach, "Thanks. ATCHOO!"

"For wha'?" asked Sun, aware that not even their carrying abilities could be thanked as the Doctor's bare feet were left to sweep the floor and they were, admittedly, doing a pretty poor job, choosing to collect nothing other than a thick lining of dust.

"Carrying me," replied the Doctor, smiling weakly through barely open eyelids, "I mean, I'm sure you could just drag me along the f-TCHOO! floor if you felt like it."

Gavin Five and Sun looked at the Doctor, whose eyes, beneath the severely obscuring eyelids, seemed to express genuine gratefulness. It was something they had never seen before, never genuinely. The feeling it evoked within them was unlike anything they had ever felt. It was as though the Doctor had unleashed a butterfly into the air whose golden light and incredibly warmth promptly leapt into their chests and nestled up against their hearts. How could something as simple as a 'thanks' cause such a peculiar feeling? Frowning, the two shrugged and continued with their task, the slightest niggling feeling eating away at the back of their minds.

_How're you, Dear?_

He could hear metal screeching, snapping and shattering in his mind as the console's sounds echoed around his head. She was as bad as him. The TARDIS was burning and freezing at the same time. She was tired and unable to sleep, bothered too much to rest for a second. Her engines were emitting furious temperatures and yet they were switched off, as there was no one inside. Everything was sparking, cracking, shattering, breaking and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She couldn't regenerate or even think about fixing herself whilst she was that ill, whilst _he _was that ill.

_No, not so good then. Me neither. Still quite talkative though, that's usually a good sign. Bad sign is when I stop talking. Very very bad sign when I stop talking. _"They say they have the cure, you know. They'll give it to me in exchange for the Secret of Time Travel."

Gavin Five and Sun frowned. The Doctor had randomly begun speaking out loud and they weren't referring to him. At least, it didn't seem that he was speaking to them. They stared at him in confusion but he didn't seem to notice, at all. He simply waited, silently, as though hearing some inaudible reply, before he continued speaking. Perhaps, they observed sadly, he'd gone mad. Then again, he seemed pretty mad when they'd picked him up in the first place, when he'd first arrived so perhaps he really was insane. They had been told that talking to oneself was a sign of madness, but he wasn't even talking to himself. He was talking to someone else who wasn't _there_. If that wasn't mad, they weren't sure what was.

"No, no, no. You know I can't. I just can't. It would be a" _betrayal and I can't do that. Not again. I mean, sure, I'm pretty good at it and I've had lots of opportunities to try it out but the last thing the _"Universe needs is for the Spiringosians to get their hands on information like that. Could cause a couple more" _Time Wars doing that sort of thing._

Gavin Five looked to Sun. The Doctor broke out into a weak smile, as though there had been some reply. Sun was from the Equator, he was curious and he had eavesdropped on many occasions. He was sure he'd heard something about a connection between the Doctor and his ship. If that was the case, then it was maybe possible that he was talking to his ship. That thought was certainly more reassuring than the thought that he was simply insane and chattering quietly to himself. Madmen, in Sun's limited experience, were bad news no matter what condition they were in. A very ill madman was just as much a danger to other people as he was to himself. The Doctor, an alien they had been warned often of, was no exception.

"You talkin' to yerself?" asked Gavin Five, unable to keep the faintest traces of fear and disgust from seeping into his thickly accented voice.

"Wha- TCHOO! What?" asked the Doctor, who, upon realising what they meant, continued, "Oh, no, no. I was talking to my ship. She's got the same thing as me, you see, and I want to make sure she's okay. Telepathic, both of us. Though if you know that… are you telepathic? ATCHOO! No, no… Spiringosians don't have latent telepathic abilities… oh! Have I been mumbling out loud?"

The pair nodded and a weak grin lighted the Doctor's face. It was clear from his eyes that, had he been fully fit, the grin would have stretched from one ear to the other with relative ease. He was very smiley for someone who was slowly dying from one of the most lethal diseases ever to have been discovered. Out of sympathy and increased levels of curiosity, they found themselves responding to him, making conversation with him. Unlike most prisoners, as well, he was quite content to merely question them about the weather and the latest political developments of the planet. As though aware of what events should befall them if they were to provide him with genuinely useful information, he seemed to avoid asking them questions regarding his ship's infection and his subsequent abduction.

"Jus' a bit, yeah." replied Sun.

Before the Doctor could speak, they stopped before a large door. It was the same large set of metallic grey double-doors that the Doctor had been taken through before. He knew, without being told, in his delirious state, precisely what was on the other side of the doors in front of him. It made his stomach turn and the pair of usually slightly autistic Spiringosians picked up on the Time Lord's discomfort. In an expression of affection so rare that it had only been performed three times in their species' history, Sun rubbed the Doctor's back reassuringly. The Doctor smiled and nodded before taking a weak but deep breath and straightening his back.

The doors swung open.

…**Amy and Rory…**

"What're they doing?"

Amy stretched upwards on her tiptoes in an attempt to see through the tiny glass window which peered outwards into the room opposite them. Red Giant were formulating their attack plan, that much was clear. They were leaning over a table in the middle of the room, pointing at a map and arguing. Furthermore, in the background, small groups of Raisins could be seen passing weapons around and being briefed with aid from the medium of whiteboards. Ghveti Tani One had forcefully pushed them out of the room, telling them that it was not their business how it went down, only that the end result was favourable to them. As such, they were left to eavesdrop outside.

"Planning and arming by the look of it," whispered Amy, aware that her proximity to the door could be enough to alert them to their eavesdropping ways, "It's difficult to tell exactly, they could be arguing about what to order from the pizzeria."

"There aren't any pizzerias."

"How do you know?" snapped Amy, turning around sharply and approaching her spouse with hands on hips, "None of the buildings have names. One could be a pizzeria."

"Sure."

There was a long pause as Amy attempted to comprehend why Rory was being so snappy. He certainly seemed on edge. In fact, she would even hazard to say that he looked stressed. Her mind briefly flittered as it attempted to link the pieces of the puzzle that would explain why Rory would be stressed until her brain finally uncovered the answer. He was worried about the Doctor. She couldn't help but smile. It was cute. He was worrying about the Doctor and if she questioned him, he'd probably explain that it was because they needed to get home. The real reason was that he considered the Doctor as a friend. Her smile grew wider. Cute.

"You're worried about him, aren't you?"

"No, I… uh," Rory turned to Amy and, seeing her immense grin, realised he had no viable defence that she would believe, "Yes. Yes I am. Why aren't you?"

"He'll be fine," she replied nonchalantly, "I bet he's already found the cure and escaped."

"Is there a way of contacting him?" asked Rory, pointing to the psychic paper that continued to protrude from Amy's pocket, "Can't we send a message on that?"

"Suppose," reasoned Amy, pulling it from her pocket and balancing it in her hands, "Never tried before."

Rory took a step forwards and the couple, despite how stupid they felt doing so, placed their hands on the psychic paper and thought really, really hard about the question they wished to send. They wanted to know if he was okay and although the paper struggled for a minute, eventually, the message appeared on the paper and subsequently vanished. Hopefully, they prayed, into the mind of their designated and dying driver. They waited for a while, a long while. The longer they waited, the longer it seemed to take.

Seconds turned into minutes and minutes seemed to drag outwards into hours that simply hadn't happened. It was an agonising wait as the occasional drips of dank machinery echoed around the tiny cold room within which they were forced to stand until called for. They stared at the paper intently and began to look amongst each other, as though fearing that perhaps they hadn't even succeeded in sending the message at all. Or worse, as their minds created scenarios in which the Doctor had already died. It was perhaps their lack of knowledge that was causing the greatest sparks of fear in their hearts.

Finally, in scrawled handwriting that was not familiar to them, a message appeared. It was signed off by, not the Doctor, but by the TARDIS. This provoked surges of confusion from the couple. The TARDIS had replied? What could that possible mean? Perhaps the Doctor was dead, or so close to dying that he was unable to reply himself. For how long had the TARDIS been replying, had she been falsely taking on the Doctor's identity or was it the Doctor taking the TARDIS's? The message itself offered evidence only to the idea that it was written by the TARDIS but could a machine really be that sentient?

_My Doctor's condition has worsened. He has a fever and his hearts are beating too fast. He is sweating profusely but is freezing from cold. He has a throbbing migraine and is too weak to stand freely. He is sneezing slightly less but the coughing fits have become more violent, it will not be long before he is coughing up blood. He is not at all well but he maintains his faith in you. He believes you will rescue him. Good Luck, my fellow Sufferers. xx TARDIS._

Words were about to break out from their mouths and form conversation when the two doors swung open with a terrifyingly thunderous metal clanging. In the doorway, a smiling Ghveti Tani One greeted them. The plans were complete and they were ready to move out. Deciding to tarry no longer, Rory and Amy nodded assertively. The Doctor had placed his faith in them and they would not let him down. With little more than a click of his fingers, Ghveti Tani One's troops were mobilised and storming out of the doors, followed by their two clients, whose eyes glistened with determination absolute.

…**The Doctor…**

"DE SECRETZ NOW!"

The cry was deafening. It rang incessantly around the Doctor's delicate ears, sounding just above the constant thuds and grinds and whirrs of his dying ship, whose sounds reverberated around his head. He groaned and tried to cover his ears, before remembering that his hands had been chained to the armchair which he had been forced into. His head rolled backwards as he attempted to focus his bleary blurry eyes onto the source of the shout. His concentration was slipping and that was bad. In fact it was so bad, there was no word in the English language which could accurately describe just how bad it really was.

"I cah –" his whispery, wistful voice was cut off by a violent, hacking cough that released tiny floating flecks of phlegm into the air. These pale yellow flakes were accompanied, on this occasion, by small clot-sized droplets of bright frothy red liquid that resembled blood. On closer inspection, as some of the aforementioned contamination had landed on his pale, almost colourless hands, he uncovered that the vibrant red liquid which resembled blood was in fact his actual blood. Though this came as no surprise, he found that his eyes widened slightly of their own accord. Coughing up blood was not something he normally did.

"NOW!"

The Time Lord was an utter wreck. The virus had turned him pale as a white rabbit slinking about under rafters of snow and vague traces of sickly blue could be seen forming around his lips and extremities. Despite this, his body was raging on the inside with a temperature that was beginning to push the upper boundaries of thirty degrees Celsius; higher than forty Celsius and his body would begin to shut down. He could already feel his hearts beginning to beat slower. Though they were returning to their ordinary resting rates at phenomenal speeds, he was very sure that they would drop past that and eventually cease beating completely. Already their joint beats were weaker.

"NOW!"

Despite his state, the Doctor was still a Time Lord. He was still the only remaining survivor of his mighty race. He was the Oncoming Storm. He was feared so much by his enemies that they locked him in an inescapable box. A speech conducted from spontaneity forced his enemies to flee for an extra half hour despite knowing they had him trapped in a trap he hadn't even recognised. He had saved the universe from total event collapse. He had stopped the Last Great Time War. And he wasn't about to let some silly little raisin-faced man with a power complex shout at him when he had a migraine. A flurry of fury flicked in his hearts and the illness was temporarily forgotten as his hoarse voice roared throughout the room.

"YOU'RE GIVING ME A MIGRAINE!" screamed the Doctor, "SHUT UP!"

The room fell silent. A voice whispered over a radio. The whisper sang throughout the room wistfully. He did not recognise the voice, dulled as it was by the storming migraine that throbbed painfully at the back of his head, creeping across his skull like an army of ants. The Doctor pulled on the handcuffs connecting his wrists to the arms of the wooden-painted-grey chair. The body tissue around his wrist protested painfully as the metal jarred into his skin, leaving a thick red mark that burned with every beat of his hearts. His bleary eyes fled around the room, returning after assured that it was the same room. Bile bubbled in his stomach, coating his mouth with a taste of disgust beyond that created by his own blood.

"Ya tell uz now," snapped Pavikatnoon quietly, "Or we're gonna leave ya in 'ere a bit longer t' see if yer'll be a bit more 'appy to cooperate once yer getting worse."

The silence of the room was as terrifying as the thought of the TARDIS dying. There was nothing to distract him from the mental connection he shared with her. There were no sounds to hear, no scents to smell, no tastes to taste. There were, in those moments of inexplicable silence, only the sounds of his TARDIS's console room as it snapped and crackled and popped and burned and sizzled. There was only the shrill whirring of his TARDIS as it whimpered from the virulent strain that was attacking it from the inside out. All the while, his own pain boiled beneath the peripheries of his consciousness, reminding him that he was in as much danger as his wonderful, amazing blue ship.

_I can't. I'm sorry. Two hours. Give them two hours._

He could faintly hear the Raisin pace impatiently around a small section of the elevated room as the TARDIS's desperate plea echoed dimly in his head, just loud enough to hear over the orchestra playing their death march. He smiled weakly. They had been together for hundreds of years, though it was far closer to a thousand than he'd happily admit. She'd originally hated his guts. He'd stolen the TARDIS, as she saw it, from her rightful owner. She'd refused to mentally connect with him at all. However, he'd grown on the TARDIS and even in his seventh incarnation, the engineers back on Gallifrey had marvelled at how closely they were connected. Now she wouldn't let him do anything without telling him it was a stupid idea and that she had no intention of bailing him out of it, which was, of course, a lie.

_Two hours. Then prepare Emergency Protocol Three. Two hours. _

"'Ello!" snapped Pavikatnoon, having lost what little sliver of virtue he owned that could be labelled as patience, "Will ya tell uz now or wha'?"

"ATCHOO!" roared the Doctor, whose violent sneeze was proceeded by a unhealthy coughing fit loaded with at least a quarter of a pint of blood, which was simply wholesomely a bad thing, "Perhaps a cup of tea, and some biscuits and less questions and you leaving the room, would persuade me to tell you to mind your own business."

"You ask'd for i', Time Lor'." spat Pavikatnoon, leaving with a sickening thud from the thick metal door as it squealed shut on hinges of rusting, aging iron-alloy metal.

"So," croaked the Doctor to no one in particular, "I take it that's a 'no' to the tea and biscuits."


	9. Beginning Rescue

_A/N: Thanks once again to those marvellous reviewers and readers who put up with my extraordinarily long sentence structures. Thanks for patiently waiting for this chapter. I'm back at school and time is a luxury which I can't really afford to spend writing this. I'll persevere, because it's a good excuse to avoid doing homework, but please be aware that it takes a very, very long time to write these and that I can't just spin them off at a moment's notice. I hope you'll understand. Now, enjoy:_

**Cold **

**Chapter Nine: Beginning Rescue**

'**I like the bit when someone says, "It's bigger on the inside!" I always look forward to that.'**

Pavikatnoon walked into the room once more. He'd been in twice after the Doctor had been returned to the room and on both occasions he had been given the same, snappy response. The Doctor had, just barely, comprehended on both of these occasions that there was a softening each time in the Raisin's voice. He had deduced eventually that sympathy was somehow beginning to pull at the heartstrings of his captor, something he had been hoping for, but certainly not expecting. Despite this apparent heightening of concern, Pavikatnoon made no effort to correct the Doctor's position as, at some point during the intervening hour between his second visit and his current, the armchair to which the Doctor was cuffed and chained had fallen onto its side. The extreme discomfort that this wrought failed completely to register in the occupied mind of the Time Lord.

"Ow long 'av' ya got?"

The question bounced noisily off the walls but took several drawn-out seconds to imprint themselves in the mind of the infected prisoner. The Doctor's eyes, for the sake of his own sanity, had been closed and remained so since Pavikatnoon's first visit. The blurry bleary nature of his eyes had begun to irritate him to a point that was unbearable, the obvious solution, therefore, was to keep his eyes closed at all costs. It made little difference to his plummeting degrees of awareness for his hearing had already begun to fail due to the distraction sounding constantly and loudly in his head. The snotty sneezy nose had rendered his capacity to smell utterly useless and as he relied on the sense far more heavily than any of his human companions ever seemed to realise, the loss of it proved to impact further upon his ability to make sense of what was going on around him. Regardless of this, a weak croak of a response eventually sounded some two minutes later.

"An hour," began the Doctor, whose heavy breathing broke out into a small series of desperate and tiny pants before his speech facilities could continue, "Fifty two minutes," whereupon another fit of breaths interrupted until a broken voice could add, "Twenty nine seconds and counting."

Though lacking in his full senses, the Doctor felt the vaguest trembles of confusion in the air, indicating the gang leader's surprise as to the precision with which the Doctor was able to predict when the virus would finally end its attack. The chair, partly due to the fact that he were chained to it by tight metal handcuffs that rubbed a sore red rash onto his otherwise deathly pale skin, hugged his figure with an uncomfortable wooden frame that caused burning cramps throughout his body. His head, as his neck muscles had long since lost the energy required to hold it up, lay on the floor. Thus, his hair, usually bouncy and a vibrant shade of brown, was left to soak in a two-pint thick bloody patch of liquid. Whilst his hair was mopping it up quite nicely, the fact that he had ceased to cough up any more was nothing short of worrying.

"Righ'," whispered the perturbed voice of Pavikatnoon, "An' I don' suppose yer'll be willin' t' finally tell our clien' wha' they wanna know?"

Shifting his head jerkily along the blood stained floor, the Doctor coughed, aware that there was no more blood being exhaled from his lungs as he did so. His face was as pale as snow, if not paler, and his lips had turned such a startling blue that they appeared, at a first glance, to be covered with a neon blue lipstick of some description. His eyes had sunken into his head slightly and huge bags of purplish black bruising hung ominously beneath his usually vividly bright eyes. His usually energy was replaced with an ill lethargy that rendered all of his jarring, jerky movements all the slower for his pains. His body was colder than ice and the sweat that had once been profusely emerging from his glands had been prevented from doing so further as a thin layer of cracking frost developed as the liquid on his forehead turned to ice.

Inside, however, his body was burning at heats that were killing him almost as fast as the disease itself was. Thirty eight degrees and a half, his disheartened hypothalamus informed him. Upon reaching thirty nine, his body would immediately begin to shut down all non-vital organs. Forty degrees centigrade and his hearts would stop. He didn't have long and all the while, the only thing that properly processed in his brain were the sounds of his dying TARDIS as she suppressed whimpering wails of piercing pain. Hearing her in pain hurt him more than any number of cramps or burns that could scorch the delicate ends of his nervous system. Knowing that his companions would probably see him in a worsened state than his current one only abased his feelings further. Delirium briefly disposed of sense and loyalty in the swiftest moment as his innate instinct of self survival forced him to utter a cry he regretted immediately once it had passed his freezing lips.

"Yes," whispered the croaking voice of the Doctor, "Fine. So long as I don't have to lie face down in my own blood anymore because I can tell you one thing," he rambled as an itching pain scrambled along his throat, "It tastes a lot worse than beans."

…**TARDIS…**

The TARDIS had always been easily alarmed. Though, it is poignant to point out that said statement should always be followed by the immediate acknowledgement that her driver was inclined to step outside the door and land himself in what was normally a heap of trouble so large as to be, at a first glance, completely ridiculous. Never before had the Universe been afflicted by one singular being who could attract a swarm of bloodthirsty bees in an underwater ocean where no such insects could possibly exist. The TARDIS never quite forgave the Doctor for inflicting that particular idiom upon her for it had stuck quite persistently in her mind ever since and she found herself using it many times more often than that Time Lord that had provided it to her in the first instance. However, the fact remained. The Doctor, once again had managed to alarm her deeply with another of his wonderfully convoluted schemes.

On this occasion, however, it was an alarm that she was not used to feeling. Her own illness had progressed so far as for the ringing of the Cloister Bell to have ceased purely out of recognising the futility of the action. The Doctor was faring little better, and the fact that he had ceased coughing up blood, merely meant more of it was seeping into his body through internal bleeding than was being exhaled through violent coughing fits. The TARDIS, had she a human voice, would have sighed exasperatedly. Instead, the closest thing she could manage was a deflated whirring sound which fluttered faintly around the cacophonic orchestra of sound that had now utterly invaded and dominated the console room. She was beginning to imagine that perhaps even the Doctor's ridiculously loud voice would have been silenced beneath the immense racket.

He didn't have long, and she didn't either. If his two companions were to intervene and save the day, they had to get moving that very instant for the smallest further delay could have catastrophic consequences for both of the time sensitive beings. Realising this, her cracking blue screens relayed, through flickering grey static attacks, the message which she was sending Amy and Rory via the psychic paper whose usefulness she had never doubted. The message read, simply, as so:

_My Doctor is much worse now. He has one hour fifty minutes and counting. If you are to save him, now would be the time. Good Luck. xx TARDIS_

It was shorter than she'd have liked but she had very little choice in the matter as her systems and capacity for sending the message began to fail after 'Good Luck', forcing her to finish off the message and send it before they failed completely, which they promptly did a few mere seconds afterwards. Only able to hope that they would be successful, the TARDIS found herself attempting to play the Sixth Doctor's music playlist only to find that every single trace of it had been deleted by the Ninth. She assumed it had something to do with Number Nine's seemingly inherent hatred of all things bright and colourful but it could have been something to do with the distinctly distasteful presence of S Club Seven on said playlist. Instead, she gave up and resorted to playing Number Eleven's playlist as it was only slightly less painful than dying.

…**Amy and Rory…**

It had been precisely twenty minutes since they had received a message on the psychic paper from who they presumed, but highly doubted, was the TARDIS. The short trek from the headquarters of Red Giant to that of Neutron had take exactly that amount of time and they were now crouched, along with the entire fighting force of their employed gang, around a corner just from their target building. The Spiringosians with whom they were waiting were all young, they deduced from the full locks of vibrant hair and the unusual lack of wrinkles, and yet they were all totally at peace with the mission they had been employed to do. The grey metallic sheens of the guns sat comfortably in their arms, as though, to some extent, they had been born with them there.

They'd been told to enter only once a clear signal had been given, this signal would be a bright red flare thrown out of one of the windows. The fact that there were any colour at all would be enough to shock them into action due to the usual grey monotony of Spiringosa. They had provided Red Giant with a photo of the Doctor, taken sneakily by Amy at the wedding when he was dancing to use later as blackmail, so that they could identify him and _not _shoot him. Red Giant's leader, and a few of his handymen, had stayed behind at the large base which they had been in overnight. The rest of the gang, however, seemed to have all turned out for the one singular mission which had been asked of them.

"So, we leave dis guy bu' we can 'urt de res' of dem?" it was the General who had asked that. His name was some unpronounceable and distant star but he was a nice enough alien. His wrinkled brown face was slightly more wrinkled than the others and his kindness seemed to indicate that perhaps he was either in, or nearing, his forties. He kept turning to Amy and Rory for assurance that what he was doing was correct, something they were secretly very grateful for as there was no room for error.

"You can only injure them." stated Rory simply but authoritatively.

"_Any _fatalities and you lose money," added Amy threateningly, "Understand?"

"Yup," nodded the General. He turned to his one group (as the rest of the gang was spread out into the distant labyrinth, able to understand only what was going on via a clever but supremely complex command chain) and shouted, "Righ' lads! Le's ge' movin'!"

They barely rose from their crouch as they sped off into a run from the corridor in which they had been waiting. They fell out of the narrow confines of the space into perfectly military lines and galloped gracefully off towards the building. It seemed to be a never-ending cycle of Raisins running past them even as distant gunfire could be heard occasionally broken up by cries of pain that were wholesomely disturbing. Amy and Rory, hypnotised briefly by the military precision of their movements, eventually turned to each other and decided to take a peek around the corner.

Popping their heads around the corner of the stone grey wall, they observed the dull bright-striped building that belonged to rival gang Neutron. A steady stream of Spiringosian soldiers were strolling through the front door. Sheets of bullets descended onto them from guns sitting in windows but none of the tiny metal bullets seemed to hit any of their intended targets, instead turning the floor into a quagmire of metal shrapnel. Three minutes later, the entire Red Giant gang, as they understood it, were in the building of their rivals, fighting their way through to clear a path for their clients.

"Wow." stated Rory.

"Does Neutron have faulty guns or are they just blind?" queried Amy as a response to having seen the very poor shooting of the members as they tried to hit straight lines of soldiers.

"Are you sure this was a good idea?" asked Rory.

"No," sighed Amy, turning to Rory with an admittedly downtrodden expression, "But what else could we do?"

There was a pause in which the usually pervading silence was disrupted by steady screaming and the sound of bullets snapping against cement walls and steel banisters. Rory was rubbing his hands, and then his arms, and then fidgeting and rubbing his hair with his hands. His nervousness flapped about in the air as though it were a real and tangible thing, poking, prodding and generally annoying his wife, whose own nervousness and anxiousness was suppressed to a point where it was noticeable only to those who knew her well enough. Amy was staring up at the building, her fingers tapping against the cement wall which she was leaning on, awaiting the red fiery flare. The two were concerned, worry eating away at their stomachs as though the idiomatic butterflies had transformed miraculously into ferocious stomach-eating monsters.

"Do you think he's okay?" asked Rory for the umpteenth time that morning. He couldn't help himself. It was the one thing that was playing constantly in his mind, as though he were a CD player caught on a loop. The only other, foreign thoughts that managed to break through his fortress of concern for their alien driver, were how they would get home if he did die, or how wise it was to trust a load of gun-wielding aliens, paid or otherwise.

"He's the Doctor," lied Amy, "He's always okay."

"If they haven't duck-taped his mouth anyway."

Amy laughed. Rory smiled. A flurry of fiery red fluttered in a window before being defenestrated from the building. Falling through the air followed by a stream of vibrant pink smoke, the flare twisted and turned, at the mercy of gravity. The red tube, now all but burnt up, hit the ground but the tiny thud this produced went unheard as it was trampled over by the pounding of two pairs of trainers attacking the ground with as much vigour as was possible without breaking apart the grey cement that made up the floor. Amy and Rory charged through the front doors, led to their goal by pointing Red Giant Raisins standing amidst Neutron Raisins with bleeding legs.

The directions led them upwards to the second floor to an observation room that looked out onto a massive warehouse area. There were boxes and crates lining the perimeter of the room and four sets of double doors led into the room. Windows in the rafters of the room were entirely open, unleashing torrent after torrent of freezing cold air into the harshly uncaring room. It was what was occupying the centre of the room that grasped their attention. A chair. A pool of blood. A lethargic figure. A tall powerful figure of a woman. A Spiringosian with a gun. And words. Echoing, audible words.

…**The Doctor…**

Victoria Kingstanding Brown had entered some two minutes before the building was attacked. She had entered with Pavikatnoon, Neutron's gang leader, who carried a gun, partly for threatening their prisoner and partly for protecting his client, who was paying him a _lot _of money. She ordered that the Doctor, who lay limp in the chair, muscles deteriorating as rapidly as his overall condition, be placed upright. The armchair was raised to its rightful position but the Doctor's hair was already soaked through with a dark, sickening brown coagulation from where he had been lying in his coughed-up blood.

She had paced up and down before him, trying to get a good look at him, and incredibly unaware that he was doing much the same to her. From her point of view, it appeared as though her source had been spouting nothing but rubbish. The Last of the Time Lords. The Oncoming Storm. A mighty man with powers of understanding beyond that of human comprehension. It was laughable, the lies, now that he lay, strapped to a chair, pale as death, slowly slipping away into the cold eternity of death. The thought that the alien before her was a thing of intelligence and energy was one that was as foreign to her as the concept of being kind; it had long since been worn away by the cold hard facts that lay before her. Her mind was only changed when he spoke. His voice was as broken as his body but his words were as magnificent as his mind.

"You're a time agent. ATCHOO!" whispered the croaking, cracking voice, "An ex-time agent. You've still got a Vortex Manipulator. Hah! Hate those things, very useful though. ATCHOO! Saved the Universe once, a Vortex Manipulator."

Victoria paused. Her high heels, which had clacked noisily against the cement floor, became silent and she stood completely straight in them, signs of a woman with vast experience in walking with heels. Her suit jacket was more of a coat that unleashed a distinctly audible whooshing sound as she moved about. The crinkling of her jacket when she moved her arms against her ribs indicated that it were a certain variety of very cheap mock-velvet, perhaps with a very modern and futuristic waterproofing mechanism. Her hair produced no noise so it was likely that it was placed in a bun, or cut so short so as to not move with momentum produced by her legs. Her pause, the Doctor deduced, told him that he was right and that she was surprised by his knowledge of her.

"How can you possibly know that?" she gasped, having let the question slip through her mouth before her mind could snap at how foolish the action had been. Her short, sharp hiss after her comment did nothing but confirm the Doctor's suspicions. She liked to control every action she did, manipulating people became much easier when you restrain your instinctive reactions. Therefore, he must have evoked genuine surprise in order to call her bluff in the way he did.

"Please!" laughed the empty, crackling voice of the Doctor, "There's so much Artron Energy on you, I can almost taste it. ATCHOO! In fact, ATCHOO! I can taste it. Now, normal Artron Energy tastes fine, sort of like marshmallows, when you're travelling safely, but, when you're travelling with Vortex Manipulators, it tastes like baked beans and they are _nasty_. ATCHOO! You're a woman with a Vortex Manipulator wandering about just years after the dissolution of the Time Agency and you've poisoned both me and my TARDIS in order to blackmail me into giving you the secrets of time. ATCHOO! You're an ex-time agent and you want to re-establish the Time Agency, hoping that the knowledge of a Time Lord will give you the authority you need to get authorisation from the Great and Bountiful Human Empire. Don't insult my intelligence. Other people have tried. It doesn't end well."

It was into this gap that the majority of the two minutes elapsed. By the time the silence had ended, oppressive and burningly boring as it was, gunfire could be heard rattling loudly off the walls of the nearest corridor. The Doctor, with his incredibly deadened senses, could just about make out with his sickeningly blurry vision that the Time Agent was fiddling about with a vial. There was one in her hands, which he naturally presumed were gloved as the only indication that there was a singular vial was that it had clanged off of another one and produced a pinging sound; a sound synonymous with two pieces of glass colliding with one another. Once the ravaging racket of war tore out amongst the building's complex, footsteps approached him rapidly, as though suddenly panicked or alarmed.

"Tell me the Secrets now and I'll give you the cure," pleaded the woman, her tone having long lost any authority it might have contained, "Just tell me the Secrets."

"You let my TARDIS suffer," snapped the Doctor, voice hissing and roaring despite its hoarseness, "I can feel her dying. And you then ask me to betray my race? To betray the _memory _of my all but extinct race? You've got prioritising issues. So have I. You should join our club. We have cakes."

"The Secrets, now!" shouted the desperate lady, "Or both you and your stupid machine can die!"

"Sorry?"

"The Secrets, NOW!"

"No, no, the other bit. I thought I heard something about a 'stupid machine'."

"Yes, your TARDIS, now give me the Secrets and you can both live!" she had, by this point, in her desperation for the answers she sought, grasped the Doctor by his head and shook it about. Her hands immediately slipped away from his jaw as his response whispered with an unnatural volume around the room echoing the sounds of war. His blurry, bloody, bleary eyes glared up with an immediacy of energy and fury that terrified her. He was right. John Hart. That stupid idiot. He'd been right when he'd retold Jack's stories. The Doctor was terrifying and terribly, terribly misleading.

Little extra thought could be given to the shocking revelation that the Time Lord before her was truly as fearsome as his reputation. Distant gunfire is a dull, repetitive sound that becomes background noise, fading into the recesses of the mind once it has become familiar. However, in a silent room, the singular resounding reverberation of sound waves produced by the firing of just one bullet is enough to silence the thoughts of any living creature. It stupefies all things into a silence of shock and surprise in which the brain registers, without word, what has just happened. The thickening, sickening sound as the bullet tears through flesh with a squelchy thud is one that is simply unforgettably disturbing. Similarly, the seemingly eternal gap of nothingness that elapses between that sound and the thud produced by the body hitting the ground, is one that forever haunts the mind in moments of undisturbed silence.

Victoria Kingstanding Brown hit the ground. Her influence in the Doctor's life had been minimal. She had served only as a key reminder that his TARDIS forever needed more protection and help. Only as a reminder that his TARDIS was his most precious possession. Indeed, the TARDIS, was more precious to him than his own hearts. However, the affair was not over as the singular vial shattered into a million pieces on the floor. The silky baby pink liquid cascaded through the air as the glass fell to the floor like a glistening rain of invaluable diamonds. The cure, in its pinky perfection, lay splattered on the floor, quickly being melded with the increasing puddle of blood that seeped from the terrible wound inflicted by the bullet that had fired mere milliseconds earlier. The cure was gone, and with it, all hope of a happy ending.

…**Amy and Rory…**

"That was the cure!"

"We don't know that!"

"What else could it have been?"

"Maybe there's a spare."

"That was the cure, Rory!" shouted Amy as they fired through the corridors of the stinking grey complex that would result in the death of their friend, "And now it's gone!"

The double doors fired open with an energy that had been lacking in the seemingly infinitely large room since the Doctor had ceased to utter cleverly witty comments. The Neutron gang leader, strangely, made no moves to stop the human couple entering the room. Perhaps it was the sense of inevitability with regards to the death of his prisoner. Perhaps it was the gun trained on the back of his head via sniper rifle. Or perhaps it were the two contorted expressions of dogged determination that sat upon the faces of the married couple. Whatever the reason, he stepped aside, moving into the shadows of the boxes as though aware that his presence was unwanted there.

"Doctor!"

"Amy?" whispered the barely audible voice, which coughed and crackled as it spoke, "Rory?"

"Doctor!"


	10. Tragedy Unfolding

**A/N: **_**Sorry for the late update. Sorry for the evil cliffhangers. The next chapter is the last, so I intend to make it the best. It may, therefore, take a little longer.**_

_**Thanks to all who are following this story and a huge thanks to those of you who are taking the time to review. It does have an impact on my writing. **_

_**Without further adieu:**_

**Cold**

**Chapter Ten: Tragedy Unfolding**

'**The way I see it, every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa the bad things don't always spoil the good things and make them unimportant.'**

"Doctor! Oh my God."

"Are you okay?"

He could hear the familiar sound of their trainers, their beautiful hand-crafted-by-some-poor-starving-minor-in-a-third-world-country trainers, as they pounded the floor viciously to get to him as fast as their legs could physically manage. He could see their blurry figures, clad in clothes whose origins were equally as questionable as those of their trainers. Their stunted forever-evolving language fell from their lips, as foreign-sounding to him in those brief moments as the concept of cruelty for fun. Before he could reply, though he was sure his garbled response would undoubtedly be of questionable understanding, they were by his chair, untying the restraints that held him to the ugly, harsh, geometric shape.

"What have they done to you!"

That was, he thought, Amy. Though, that level of concern from her seemed odd. Perhaps it was Rory. The pitch of the voice didn't exactly help: Rory's voice was hardly the booming, rolling thunder of some of the male companions whose voices he had grown accustomed to. He couldn't even feel them undoing the restraints; he only really noticed they had done so once the handcuffs had fallen from his body. Unbeknownst to them, the metal chains that were rubbing and cutting into his deathly pale skin were the only things keeping him from slumping so far into the chair as to fall out of it and onto the floor where a growing puddle of blood greeted him with a dull splash.

"He's weaker than a kitten!"

"What's new?"

Ah. Now that was Amy. That was definitely Amy. She had an innate habit of telling him at every available opportunity that he was as weak as a kitten, or a newt, or a chick; it varied daily.

"Doctor?"

A bright flash penetrated his blurry vision, causing him to flinch away and lash out violently in the general direction of the light.

"Ouch!"

"Oh, you big pansy!"

"He hit me!"

"You were shining a torch in his face!"

A torch? Where did Rory even get a torch _from_? The Spiringosians on the Equator never went outside. They certainly never went outside at night, so they certainly would have no need for a torch. In fact, he reassured himself, he was quite sure that the Spiringosians had only discovered torches after contact with humans and even then, the whole concept of a light-producing portable hand-held device had never quite caught on. It had been a trend for a while but like fashion styles on Earth, after a few months, people had grown bored of it and moved onto something newer and more interesting.

"He reacted anyway. So he's conscious."

He managed a frown and an expression of 'duh!' which the pair seemed to have noticed. He was helped into a sitting position though for a brief moment, he just thought his arms were being attacked by an army of arachnids, which he'd experienced before often enough to remember it in great detail. Once sitting, his head rolled onto his shoulders and chest, unable to remain upright. As Rory remarked to Amy, the Doctor was just barely aware of what was physically happening to him. His concern, in fact, lay elsewhere.

"Doctor, the cure fell on the floor, it's smashed… it's gone."

This time the frown was a deeper one, contorting his face into an aged, wrinkly mass of flesh that was wholesomely unattractive. His breathing was audible on the peripheries of his hearing range, something that frightened him when it occurred to him. Laboured and wheezy, he sounded more like the TARDIS when it tried to materialise than a Time Lord. He could only imagine the sort of quips and witty remarks he'd be getting off Time Lord society for sitting in a pool of his own coughed-up blood, on the verge of death, with a dying TARDIS and nothing but humans to save him. It was almost a good thing they weren't around anymore, if only because he didn't have to worry about living down the whole experience.

"Did you hear her? Doctor, the cure's gone. What do we do?"

The change was almost, but not quite, due to his now very poor reaction time, instantaneous. His TARDIS had been dying since the poison-disease had been administered but, as certain pessimistic humans have a tendency to point out, everyone's dying, all the time. However, his TARDIS was actually dying. Her systems were failing. One by one, she began to shut down. Like a computer whose been overloaded and simply can't take it anymore. Like a human suffering the terrible symptoms of Alzheimer's where the body's organs slowly stop, as though having given up altogether on whatever brilliant mind may have once occupied the slowly diminishing brain. It was painful. It was like a piece of him was dying… mostly because, a piece of him actually _was _dying.

Rose had once remarked, very cleverly, that the TARDIS translation circuits had ceased to work on that Christmas Day that felt so very long ago. She theorised that perhaps the TARDIS wasn't working because the Doctor was ill. The TARDIS felt, at that time, as though a piece of herself was broken and burning with healing energy. This time, the feeling was reversed, the TARDIS's soul was breaking up, beginning to perish and float away and the Doctor could _feel _it. He could feel his essence willing itself to float away with her and his entire body burned with an uncontainable sense of rage and hatred and despair and hope and devastation and fear. His fists had clenched without him realising. His face had scrunched up in pain. His body quivered with visible freezing fear. Tears rolled over his cheeks.

"Doctor?"

"What's wrong?"

He couldn't tell who'd spoken. He didn't really care either. His TARDIS was dying and so was he and he had far more important things to worry about than reassuring his companions. Then it struck him. Like an iron fist to the gut. Winding him so strongly that he could not breathe for seconds afterwards. How could he have been so slow? It was so obvious! He was becoming far too slow. One day, he would be too slow to save anyone. He had to change. Become faster. But that was for another day. Another life. He made a mental note. Next time. Next time. Next time, he has to be faster. Much faster. As fast as he was when he was young. If not faster. He has to be the best, he has to save everyone. And he's just rambled when there's no time to waste.

"Vortex Mn-" he frowns and tries again, "Vor-" again, "Vor-"

"Vortex Manipulator?"

They understood! Rory had understood. He was so very glad. He nodded.

"You want us to give you the Vortex Manipulator?"

Okay. So perhaps he hadn't completely understood. If he'd completely understood, he wouldn't have asked that question. Stupid Rory. The Doctor nodded.

"What're you going to do with that?"

Amy, confused as always. She made no attempt to help out her husband as he squirmed and squealed 'ew!' in an attempt to wrestle the Vortex Manipulator off the wrist of a dead woman whose bullet wound was visible on her head as he did so. Eventually, the girlish sounds of disapproval ceased and his hands were lifted, before a heavy yet familiar object was dumped within them. Though slimy with what he assumed to be blood, the Doctor recognised the device in his hands as the Vortex Manipulator. He smiled. Perhaps they could get out of this mess yet.

"Sh-" his throat was so dry, it would be a miracle if he could get a word out, "She-" victory! A word! He tried to continue, "Lie-" damn. Perhaps not so lucky.

"She lie? She lied?"

"Ye-" frowning he attempted once more, "Yes. Two cu-"

"Two? There are two? Where?"

"Not," pause, "So," pause, "Happy."

"Why? What?"

"You can _understand _him?"

"He _is _speaking English, Rory!"

"Second in pock-" two and a half words, that's a record, "Smashed like first," wow, record's broken already.

"Then why have we given you the- oh! Oh!"

"Ha!" he smiled, one of them had got it, "You got it."

"Got what?" What's he talking about, Amy?"

"The Vortex Manipulator. He's going to send one of us back to pickpocket the second cure out of her coat before she's shot and both smash. We bring it back here and we have a cure!"

"Great!"

There was a long pause.

"Except neither of us know how to _use _a Vortex Manipulator."

The Doctor just about managed to roll his eyes. They clearly hadn't been paying attention. He'd been tapping in pre-set coordinates and commands ever since the thing had been dumped into his hands. It wasn't difficult. He'd been able to do it at lightning speeds when faced with the end of the universe. In comparison, his current levels of stress were nothing. Positive that the right coordinates and commands had been set, he reached out with his right arm, which shook and strained and shivered from the effort, and found Amy's soft skin. He passed her the slimy, sticky device and pointed towards the one button that would take her there.

"There," he pointed to another one and ordered, "Back."

"Good luck, Amy."

"Luck? I don't need luck!"

A flash of white indicated, even behind closed, sticky eyelids, that Amy had activated the Vortex Manipulator and exited the current time stream. It was just him and Rory and Rory didn't know. Rory didn't know that the Doctor had just taken in the whole illness. Rory didn't know that the TARDIS was now completely healthy. Rory didn't know that one of his hearts had ceased to beat.

…**Amy and Victoria Kingstanding Brown…**

If there were one thing of which she was sure, it was that the Doctor was an idiot. Okay. Yes, he was on the verge of death. Yes, he had other things on his mind. Yes, he was tapping in controls on a device coated with blood. But why, oh why, had he given her so little time to perform her job. The blue flash of light had immediately taken her to the few seconds before the gun was due to unleash its cacophony of orchestral death. The woman paced before her, pausing as the Doctor whispered his response to her.

"You should join. We have cakes."

Amy pivoted about on her feet. Behind her, watching her with eyes that were strangely unsurprised, stood the gang leader of Neutron, who she had been shown a picture of by Ghveti Tani One. He smiled at her. His ugly, wrinkly brown face contorted and distorted like a bent-out-of-shape mirror at a carnival. Four shining, glistening bright eyes, burning with intellect far beyond what his appearance allowed someone to perceive, stared at her, as though encouraging her and endorsing her task. She frowned and tilted her head at him curiously, about to open her mouth as the events of the past shouted and echoed violently around the room with a suddenness that almost caused a terrified scream to pass from her lips.

"The Secrets, now!" came the deafening shout, which resounded and reverberated and danced off the walls of the vast room as though it were a solid object of incredibly destructive nature, "Or both you and your stupid machine can die!"

The pause seemed to last forever as ten of the final fifty seconds of Victoria Kingstanding Brown's life ticked away. Amy watched anxiously, aware that the woman could turn around and spot her at any given moment. Thankfully, she was too distracted, as Amy was, by the Doctor's whispered reply. The response was broken; quivering and quavering beneath a wavering whisper that seemed to be caused by the Time Lord's illness. The second response indicated otherwise.

"Sorry?"

"The Secrets, NOW!"

As though shouting would make any difference.

"No, no, the other bit. I thought I heard something about a 'stupid machine'."

Amy resisted the urge to slap and punch and laugh at the pathetic woman who thought that shouting would solve her problem. This urge was quickly heightened as the woman waltzed over to the Doctor and grabbed his chin, lifting it upwards and holding it there. The skin around her grasp whitened rapidly from the immensely harsh pressure being exerted there. The Doctor showed no expression that suggested he felt it. Indeed, there was no visible emotion on his face at all. Amy watched with morbid horror as the evil lady leant forward and hissed aggressively into the ears of the Doctor.

"Yes, your TARDIS, now give me the Secrets and you can both live!"

Amy couldn't see what exactly happened between them at that moment but the woman gasped and took several steps backwards, bumping into Amy. Quickly ceasing the opportunity that apparently divine intervention had offered her, Amy's expert hand plunged into the woman's pocket and pulled out a glass vial. Smiling even as the woman span around with an expression of horror, Amy slammed her finger into the button the Doctor had shown her. Fading with a fast inward explosion of blue-white light, the terrible deafening roar of the orchestra sounded, ending with the terrible thud of body against floor.

…**The Doctor and Rory…**

"Doctor!"

So Rory _had _noticed. Well that was at least a slight improvement. He could keep going for another ten minutes if Rory performed continual CPR on his heart, the one that had stopped; the one whose resounding silence echoed hollowly the double-beat of its brother. He suddenly felt a pair of fingers, paired together with a forced marriage of panic, fumbling at his neck. Together, the couple of digits found their intended target, a weakly throbbing vein. Rory had been made familiar with the Doctor's unusual heartbeat on several occasions so he instantly recognised that one of the hearts had ceased to sound its drumbeat.

"Don't you dare! Don't you _bloody _dare!"

Rory swore? Well, it wasn't really a swear word but it wasn't something he was accustomed to hearing from Rory's mouth: from Amy's mouth, maybe, but Rory? Never. There was a sharp and sudden pressure powering onto the left side of his chest. It was a heavy sensation that pressed down with enough force to cause the bones to whimper and whine and strain under the power. His ribcage screamed painfully as the incredible weight bombarded him to the beat of one hundred attacks per minute. He couldn't help but cry out and a small lapse of confidence in the onslaught indicated that Rory was not without guilt for causing these deafening, primal yells.

"C'MON!"

There was a flash of light. Tinted with blue and purple and fire and gold, he instantly knew it to be Amy, returning from the past via the Vortex Manipulator. He could smell the twisted Artron Energy as it fluttered and flittered around the room as though wishing to resemble the beauty of a butterfly; something it should have been well aware that it could never have achieved. Seeing him like this was undoubtedly going to be traumatic for them, if he survived. If he didn't, part of the TARDIS's Emergency Protocol was to erase their memories of him. If he did, he was considering wiping their memories of this event anyway. Trauma + Humans = BAD.

"Amy!"

"What happened?"

"One of his hearts has stopped. Do you have the cure?"

He could imagine a proud smile breaking out onto her face at that very moment. Just as he could imagine the glint of the glass as it was danced upon by the prevailing veils of light that dappled through the window panes above. He could hear the thick pink pearlescent liquid slopping against the sides of the glass vial, leaving an ugly residue, a greasy stain on the divine instrument. He was not aware of what happened in the ten seconds between those ramblings of his admittedly overactive imagination and when he felt the freezing cold heated sand pressing against his burning bottom lip. The cold tore through his senses as his ribcage continued to whine in pain from the pressure of CPR.

"Drink it, it's the cure."

"C'mon, c'mon."

"You have to take us back, remember? Back to boring old Leadworth?"

Oh yes. He remembered Leadworth. If ever a place had been as boring as there, he was quite happy never knowing it. He smiled as the glacial gloopy mess fell down the back of his throat, soothing the burning desertification taking place within the confines of his neck. He could feel it tearing down with its terrible temperature, trickling down his gullet until it settled, like the delicate web of a spider, over his stomach. There, he lost track of it, fearing that perhaps it had been lost, that it was too late, and that his second heart had slowed for no reason other than his impending death.

"Doctor!"

"Doctor!"

His eyes must have drooped further in those seconds, before falling completely behind the sanctity of his eyelids, covered with sticky yellow coagulation of a liquid which he would rather not have been aware of.

_Thump-thump-thump-thump._

His mouth fell slightly agape and his chest forgot to rise again once it had fallen.

_Thump-thump-thump._

His left heart began to kick itself into life from the efforts of Rory's rather persistent CPR attempts but the right had finally given up, conceding victory to the terrible, terribly virus turned poison.

_Thump-thump._

Perhaps he should concede too.

_Thump-thump._

Perhaps it was just for the best.

_Thump._

Perhaps.

…


	11. Ending Tale

**Cold**

**Chapter Eleven: Ending Tale**

'**JERONIMO!'**

Amy paced.

Rory paused.

What else could she do?

What else could he do?

Her heart was thrumming in her chest and her stomach was twisting, turning and contorting at every viable opportunity. Her nerves were alight with tension; there was nothing she could do that would calm herself. She would brush through her hair with her hands but found that they would find a clumped knot and proceed no further. She would bite her nails but quickly find that there were none long enough left to bite. She would twiddle with the ends of her top only to find that the seams had come loose and were unravelling in her hands.

He could feel his heart throbbing against his ribcage and his stomach was ripping at its own insides, as though the effect of doing so would somehow put out the tiny flames that were scorching the edges of his nerves. He would pause to breathe as exhaustion gripped him before duty would force him to continue once more. He would bite his lower lip to calm himself but he stopped soon after he tasted the tang of iron in his mouth. He would breathe deeply but such actions quickly descended into fits of hysterical panting that did nothing but upset him further.

"Is he-"

"No."

"And his hearts, are they-"

"Neither are."

"Will he-"

"I don't know."

Never before had such a large empty room felt so oppressive and tense and small and uncomfortable. Tension was tangible in the air and aggression was just seconds away from erupting from the volcanoes of nervousness. There was nothing they could do but wait and hope and already despair was beginning to sneak up upon them and strip flesh from the back of their minds, like tiny little devilish creatures of the mind willing nothing but the destruction of hope in their foolish little human brains. The clicks and clacks of footsteps were the only things audible throughout the complex as Red Giant had long since removed its Neutron prisoners at the command of Amy some seconds earlier. The compressions were silent, barely creating a thud as they progressed soundlessly.

"What will we-"

"I don't want to-"

"But what if h-"

"HE WON'T, RORY!"

Silence sang as the pacing paused. Then, delicately:

"He can't."

Pause.

"I know."

They continued. They would not give up. They would never give up. They _could _never give up. Were they any other species, perhaps they would have begun to question the naivety of continuing after five minutes had already passed, but they were humans and they were stupid. It was once said that Courage is the kindest word for Stupidity. Stupidity, then, is the meanest word for Love. For Love is not blind. It is merely Stupid. Love will wait when everything else has ceased to. Love will hope when everything else has begun to despair. Love will protect when there is neither shield left nor cause to do so. Therefore, Amy and Rory Williams were the stupidest humans that ever had lived.

…**TARDIS…**

From her vast experience, and equally vast database, the TARDIS was more than aware that humans were stupid. Her pilot had remarked so on several occasions, be it to the face of a human or in the furious heat of a rant. She also remembered vaguely that they were the most superb race the universe will, does and ever had the pleasure to know. The ultimate paradox lay within the human, both anatomical and psychological. So, she was unsurprised to find that Amy and Rory were still waiting for the recovery of their friend after a tense ten minutes. Stupid and wonderfully, beautifully clever.

She recalled once questioning her pilot as to why he suffered to keep those stupid apes around him. He had smiled and every incarnation he had given the same response, though in admittedly very different words and accents. Every time, he had smirked as though speaking to an incredibly unintelligent child. She had asked him just three days earlier, when Amy had accidentally ejected one of the rooms out of existence by leaning on one of the console's buttons. He had smiled, grinned and laughed. He had told her that, 'they're the best stupid apes out there'. She did tell him that they were the only stupid apes he'd ever really gotten close enough to get to know, but he had merely laughed her off, as he always did.

She found it incredibly amusing that the two humans were about to give up. Fifteen minutes and they were beginning to doubt? She'd have to tell her pilot about that. He'd find that most amusing. He'd forgive them instantly of course. They'd have to kill someone for him to not forgive them, and it would have to be direct killing as well. None of this indirect killing lark, the 'man' never counted that as killing unless it was him that had done the indirect murder. The two humans were probably expecting him to just wake up. How naïve. That or they were waiting for the knight in shining armour to appear with another cure.

The TARDIS's engines purred with excitement and energy. Well, she was no knight, she was a box, and she wore no shining armour, she was blue, and she had no cure, no cure save for the infinite beauty of her wheezing, grinding, whirring engines as she dematerialised out of existence to fade in and materialise elsewhere, but she was quite sure that she could alleviate the humans of any of their flawed doubts as to the condition of their crazy madman.

…**Amy and Rory…**

"Are you going to-"

"Should I?"

"No, but, it's just that-"

"He might."

"But what if he doesn-"

"He's been shot by a Dalek."

"That was differ-"

"How?"

A feminine sigh swept across the vast room, flittering upon the tiny tornadoes of wind as though taking on the physical, tangible form of a butterfly. The pacing had ceased yet the compressions continued. The pair, the couple, the partners, the lovers, stood over their lost friend, wondering, debating, fearing just how lost he was. Were he on the peripheries of lost-ness, he could be recovered, brought back, made to be like them once more. Were he deep within the forbidden country of Lost, he could never be recovered and he would be forever abandoned to the foreign, unknown land.

"Ror-"

_WHRAPP!_

Their heads shot up faster than any bullet could ever hope, every pray to travel. There was not, in that tiny segment of time, a thing in the universe that could move faster than their speeding skulls.

_WHRAPP!_

These aerodynamic heads snapped silently to the side with speeds that suggested their skulls had miraculously turned from bone to the lighter, stronger carbon fibre of F1 racing car bodies. Their eyes, sharp as those of any predatory creature in the universe, known or otherwise, latched onto the source of the sound before it was even fully there.

_WHRAPP!_

In the doorway of the room winds picked up, battling and battering anything that foolishly decided to be in the vicinity of that area at that precise moment in time. Amy's mouth fell slightly agape though the edges of her bright red lips turned upwards into a smile of pride and hope. Her heart was torn open by the tiny little flickering flame of fire that was hope immemorial. Her mind had been turned away from the source of her unease and anxiousness as this new arrival demanded her complete attention.

_WHRAPP! _

A phantom of a faint shape faded briefly into vision before vanishing completely out of their sight. Rory rose to his feet. His two clasped hands released each other and fell to his sides. His hands had abandoned their vitally important place continuing the life-saving compressions.

_WHRAPP! Thump._

The ghostly yet gregarious rectangular shape returned, this time leaving the faintest blue/purple/white/red/orange/yellow/blue trace as it did so. Amy and Rory watched in awe as the machine they knew so well faded in and out of their reach, in and out of their vision, in and out of the universe itself.

_WHRAPP! Thump-thump._

Words became visible as it did so again, the object becoming more and more solid with every wheeze and groan and roar that sounded from its ancient, new engines. The married couple smiled, believing with a vast naivety that their friend would come bounding out of the machine once it had fully materialised, explaining to them that the person lying on the floor behind them wasn't really him.

_WHRAPP! Thump-thump-thump._

Just once more. They knew that one more roar of the ancient grinding engines and the TARDIS would materialise. It would sit in the modern grey room and stand out startlingly with its bright blue, its alien lettering, its unfamiliar architecture. Yet, it would also blend with its environment, fading into the background as though, somehow, no matter where the thing was, no matter how alien it was, it would always belong.

_WHRAPP! THUD! _

The TARDIS materialised. Its perfect blue destroyed the dark monotony of the grey building. Its English wording obliterated the terrible predictability of the unchanging complex. The signs upon its panelled doors were symbolic of justice and aid. One symbol was that of the force that sought to rid the universe of evil; that sought to punish the bad and protect the good. The second symbol was that of help: help that sought to aid everyone; be they activists of evil or good. The TARDIS was a perfect symbol of its owner, though no one before had seemed to make that fairly obvious connection.

_Thump-thump-thump-thump._

"The TARDIS!" exclaimed Amy, running over to push the door open, expecting the pilot to be standing around the console with a gleaming grin on his face. Her own, therefore, fell into a broken-hearted frown once the doors open and revealed an empty console room burnt and damaged and scorched sizzling from the damaging disease that had destroyed their lives in just under 48 hours.

_Thump-thump-thump-thump._

"It's empty?" asked Rory. The confusion in his voice was as obvious and clear as the TARDIS's distinct lack of pilot. He frowned and walked over, placing a protective and reassuring hand on the shoulder of his wife as he peered into the TARDIS, evidently untrusting of his own wife's eyesight. His face fell even further as he regarded with his own eyes what Amy had herself observed.

_Thump-thump-thump-thump._

"River?" Amy called into the TARDIS, "River, is that you in there?"

_Thump-thump-thump-thump._

"How can the TARDIS have flown here?" asked Rory, "It needs a pilot."

"_She _needs a pilot."

_Thump-thump-thump-thump_.

"And you're wrong."

_Thump-thump-thump-thump._

"She doesn't need a pilot all the time."

Rory and Amy span about slowly. They wanted to believe it was true but a large part of them didn't want to for fear that perhaps it was their imaginations. They pivoted one hundred and eighty degrees. Their eyes fell upon their pilot, their madman, their Doctor. And there he was, as though nothing had happened. He was sitting upwards, looking quite uncomfortable. His hands immediately padded around his neck for the bowtie and a sigh of relief as loud as a bomb going off exploded around the room. He leapt to his feet and issued a prolonged _eurgh!_ sound as he realised that he had been lying in a pool of his own coughed up phlegm-y blood.

"What're you two looking at?" the Doctor demanded, "You can stop staring any time you like but if you carry on like that I might start charging you money."

There were no shouts, no declarations of his name. They didn't need to say anything. Amy ran up to him and hugged him. Such was the force of her hug, he nearly fell over back into the pool of nasty coagulated sticky mess that he _really _did not want to be in again. Still, he couldn't help but smile at them as Amy disengaged the hug and Rory patted him 'manily' on the shoulder. He was happy. This was going on his pile of good things. His pile of good things was definitely rivalling that of his bad things. One day, it might even overtake it. He'd like that. He'd like that a lot.

"We thought you'd gone." stated Rory.

"As if it's that easy to get rid of me!" retorted the Doctor.

"Perhaps we should try Cillet Bang." suggested Amy.

"Cillet Bang? Cillet Bang!" snapped the Doctor, ushering them towards the TARDIS after he removed his jacket from the bloody mess into which it had fallen, "Bet you ten quid Cillet Bang won't get the blood out of my jacket."

"Cillet Bang isn't used for jackets," stated Rory, "Or materials in general actually."

"No wonder you twenty-first century humans are always complaining about it then!"

…**Some time later…**

"You two owe me ten quid!"

They heard the Doctor's energetic, resounding voice resonating around the TARDIS's console room long before he even entered the vast room. They were already exchanging exasperated smiles when he appeared at the top of the stairs. Dressed in clean clothes and washed, the Time Lord looked as though nothing had ever happened to him. Nobody could have possibly guessed that just an hour earlier he had been lying in his own blood with neither of his hearts functioning the way they were supposed to be – as in, at all.

"We didn't agree to any bet!" retorted Rory.

"Besides, you didn't get us a wedding present," reminded Amy, "So, you owe us."

"What!" roared the Doctor, utterly offended by the very suggestion. He glared at them before leaping down the stairs with more energy than a nursery could safely contain and swinging around the console with a smile on his face, "I take you to alien planets and the past and the future in my one-of-a-kind ship! I think that's a pretty good wedding present."

"Certainly unique." agreed Rory.

The Doctor smiled. He began attacking the console, pulling levers and hammering uncooperative buttons with a hammer that had been recovered a week earlier from a box somewhere within the bowels of the TARDIS, much to the TARDIS's frustration. Amy and Rory watched, marvelling at how quickly he had recovered and how it seemed like the events of the past two days were little more than a distant and very unbelievable dream. They decided to question him on it before he too decided that it was a distant dream that didn't really happen.

"So, what are Time Agents?" asked Amy.

"Oh, them. Yes. Well. Bunch of people in the 51st Century discover time travel, called themselves the Time Agency – very uninventive, Time Lords would have had a fit – and employed a few people called Time Agents. Only called Time Agents once they joined 'f course, good friends with one actually, watch out for him, he'll turn up eventually, always does-"

"Why did one of them want you?" asked Rory.

"Oh yes, the Time Agency was disbanded and there are only seve- six Time Agents left, all but two are jobless and wondering what to do with themselves. One of them, when there were seven, thought that getting the infamous 'Secrets of Time' would be enough to recreate the Time Agency and go around fiddling some more with the time stream. That was the one we had the misfortune to run into – Victoria Kingstanding Brown, I believe her name was."

"And only you have the Secrets of Time?" asked Amy.

"Well. Ish. The TARDIS has them as well and K9 has a third of the information, and then if _he_ was still alive, _he_'d know. But pretty much, yeah, I'm the only one who – well, actually, I've forgotten a little bit, the bit about temporal inter-dimensional travel, but that's not really that important. _Well, _I say not important, it's sort of important but the TARDIS knows that bit so I'm alright."

The engines whirred pleasantly.

"And you're okay now?" queried Rory, voice dripping with the need for reassurance that his ex-patient wasn't about to suddenly collapse and die from another illness that could only be cured by jumping back in time and pick-pocketing a crazy ex-Time Agent.

"Yup, right as rain!" declared the Doctor, clapping his hands together before frowning and mumbling, "Though, how rain can be 'right' I don't know, you English and your idioms!"

"Where to next then?" asked Amy, her voice brimming with the excitement that she'd caught off the Doctor upon his entrance into the room.

"Alton Towers!"

"Alton Towers?" asked Amy, clearly disappointed, "The theme park in England?"

"No! No!" stated the Doctor, "Alton Towers, the planet!"

Amy and Rory grinned like the madman piloting his wonderful ship as it tore through the time vortex to its destination that was wholesomely _not_ the very awesome sounding planet promised by the Doctor; it would eventually, once they stepped out of the doors, turn out to be another of those occasions where the Doctor's poor piloting skills would land them somewhere that inevitably required their help.

…**A minute later…**

"Alton Towers Planet, you said."

"Yes, I did, didn't I?"

"Best theme park in existence, you said."

Pause.

"Where are we again? I forgot."

"Wales."

Pause.

"Not exactly Alton Towers Planet is it?"

"HELP! HELP ME!"

Pause.

"We can't take you anywhere can we?" asked Rory incredulously, who then looked around with a confused expression on his face and asked of Amy, "Where'd he go?"

"HURRY UP YOU TWO!"

**A/N: And so we have reached the end with the convenient number of exactly 11 chapters. I hope you enjoyed it and reviews of the entire story now that you've had the opportunity to read it would be greatly appreciated, particularly as I stayed up past midnight to write the end. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I enjoyed writing it!**


End file.
